─── THE EARLY 2010s WING ───
the smartphone takeover begins. desktop-era services that never made it onto a phone start going dark.
1628 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
pre80s | 80s | 90s | 00s | 10s ([2010-2014] · 2015-2019) | 20s
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2014-12-31
Boxee (2008 - 2014)
boxee was the media-center software (and later set-top box) that tried to be the netflix-of-everything before netflix was the netflix-of-everything. it forked...
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2014-12-31
Facebook Home (2013 - 2014)
zuckerberg got on stage in april 2013 and pitched a phone that put facebook in front of every other app on the home screen. people hated it within hours. the...
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2014-12-31
iRiver (1999 - 2014)
the geeky korean mp3 player brand. it was what you bought when the ipod was too expensive, or when you wanted something that played ogg vorbis without...
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2014-12-31
Microsoft MapPoint (2000 - 2014)
mappoint was the consumer-grade gis on a desk. it shipped in nine versions between 2000 and 2013, mostly aimed at business users who needed to plot excel...
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2014-12-31
Neopets (1999 - 2014)
the virtual pet site. you adopted a neopet (faerie kacheek, christmas shoyru, stealthy gelert), fed it, played with it, dressed it up. the site had hundreds of...
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2014-12-31
PlayStation Portable (2004 - 2014)
the psp was sony's bet that a handheld could be both a gameboy competitor and a portable media player. it sold 76 million units across ten years, lost most of...
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2014-12-31
Reader Rabbit (1984 - 2014)
reader rabbit was the flagship reading-instruction software the learning company started shipping in 1984 for the apple ii. ann mccormick and her co-founders...
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2014-12-31
RealPlayer (1995 - 2010s)
the first streaming media player most people used. realaudio and realvideo were the formats. the player was indispensable in 1998 and progressively more...
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2014-12-31
Sodaplay (SodaConstructor) (2000 - 2014)
the flash physics toy where you built walking creatures from springs and masses. drag a node, attach a spring, set the muscle frequency, watch the thing limp...
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2014-12-31
Wetpaint (2005 - 2014)
wetpaint launched in october 2005 in seattle as a wiki anyone could spin up without learning markup syntax. it became the default home for fan wikis about tv...
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2014-12-31
Yahoo Directory (1994 - 2014)
yahoo directory was the original yahoo. before it was a portal it was just two stanford students keeping a list of every interesting website they could find,...
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2014-12-31
Microsoft AutoRoute (1988 - 2014)
microsoft autoroute was the european version of streets and trips, a boxed route-planner that ran on windows and covered thirty-seven countries from the uk...
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2014-12-31
Java ME (2001 - 2014)
java me, originally java 2 platform micro edition, was sun's mobile java subset for resource-constrained devices, built around the kvm runtime and the midp...
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2014-12-31
Oracle Beehive (2008 - 2014)
oracle beehive was an enterprise collaboration server combining email, calendar, instant messaging, team workspaces, conferencing under one administrative...
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2014-12-31
Qualcomm BREW (2001 - 2014)
brew (binary runtime environment for wireless) was qualcomm's app platform for cdma feature phones. it shipped on ktfreetel in korea in november 2001 and on...
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2014-12-31
Trapster (2007 - 2014)
trapster started in november 2007 as one man's version of a gesture drivers had been making at each other for decades, which is the headlight flash that warns...
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2014-12-31
Mundo Canibal (1998 - 2014)
mundo canibal was brazil's flash humor site, built by the piologo brothers with rogerio vilela around a character rodrigo had drawn in 1994. from 1998 it put...
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2014-12-31
Dr. Dobb's Journal (1976 - 2014)
it started in january 1976 as a xeroxed newsletter with a nine-word title, printed to circulate free implementations of tiny basic at a moment when a basic...
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2014-12-31
Looxcie (2008 - 2014)
a button on the side saved the last thirty seconds of whatever you had just been looking at, and that was the entire pitch. looxcie built a bluetooth headset...
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2014-12-31
Wimba (1998 - 2014)
founded in paris in 1998 to push voice into web pages for language teachers, merged into a new york company six years later, then sold to blackboard as half of...
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2014-12-31
VirginMega.fr (2004 - 2014)
may 2004, a few weeks ahead of itunes in france, virgin megastore opened a download store with not one major label track in it. the majors came later and the...
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2014-12-31
Gfranq (2012 - 2014)
on 2 march 2012 a married couple in russia shipped a browser photo editor with forty-eight film filters and a page to keep the results on. by december that...
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2014-12-31
Taiwan Railway Net (2003 - 2014)
eleven years of taiwanese railfan photography sat on trc.net.tw, and in november 2014 the site said facebook had taken its readers. it began in march 2001 as a...
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2014-12-31
nRelate (2009 - 2014)
iac decided it would rather use nrelate than sell it. the widget had been sitting under the last paragraph of more than a hundred thousand blogs since 2009,...
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2014-12-31
Samsung Video Hub (2012 - 2014)
samsung put a movie store inside the galaxy s iii in may 2012 and switched it off two and a half years later. selling stopped on 1 december 2014. to keep a...
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2014-12-31
Nokia Trailers (2012 - 2014)
the goodbye note recommended xbox video. nokia trailers was a lumia exclusive that let you download a film trailer and watch it later with no signal at all,...
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2014-12-29
Linux Outlaws (2007 - 2014)
370 episodes over seven years, recorded on mondays in two countries and released on wednesdays in ogg as well as mp3. dan lynch and fabian scherschel announced...
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2014-12-24
Slide Bureau (2014 - 2014)
a six-person design studio in seattle, run by two people who had left microsoft, decided the problem with slide decks was not the software but the design, and...
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2014-12-22
Animal Crossing Plaza (2013 - 2014)
animal crossing plaza was a free wii u app that existed to be a lobby. you pulled screenshots off your new leaf cartridge through an sd card and posted them...
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2014-12-19
GetGlue / tvtag (2007 - 2014)
getglue was the foursquare of television. you opened the app while watching a show and checked in to that episode. the app handed you a sticker plus a feed of...
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2014-12-18
BrowserChoice.eu (2010 - 2014)
the browser ballot was the european commission's remedy for microsoft bundling internet explorer with windows. from march 2010 any windows machine in the eea...
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2014-12-16
OpenSocial (2007 - 2014)
opensocial was a public api specification google announced november 1 2007, a set of common interfaces that let a single third-party application run unmodified...
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2014-12-16
PeerIndex (2009 - 2014)
peerindex sold agencies a number that claimed to tell them who mattered on twitter. brandwatch bought it in december 2014 for cash and equity, folded the score...
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2014-12-16
[email protected] (1998 - 2014)
in 1998 a portal called list.ru wanted a software section, and an independent developer named stanislav zharkov had already started building one. that catalog...
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2014-12-15
Helium.com (2002 - 2014)
helium was the andover writing community where members wrote articles and rated each other's submissions head to head. mark ranalli launched it around 2002 and...
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2014-12-15
Viddy (2011 - 2014)
viddy was a mobile app for shooting short video clips and sharing them with a filter on top, pitched in 2012 as the instagram for video. it raised thirty...
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2014-12-15
Relay (2013 - 2014)
twenty-six days separated the announcement from the shutdown. kik bought the toronto startup on 19 november 2014 and took both founders into waterloo. relay...
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2014-12-12
AllGame (1998 - 2014)
allgame started in february 1998 as the all game guide, the video game arm of the all media guide project that also produced allmusic and allmovie. it went...
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2014-12-10
ZipList (2008 - 2014)
fourteen million dollars bought condé nast a recipe box in april 2012, and thirty-two months later condé nast switched it off. ziplist began as a shared...
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2014-12-05
Nokia Sync (2008 - 2014)
microsoft finished buying nokia's phone business in april 2014 and switched off its contact sync service eight months later. ovi sync had launched in 2008 to...
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2014-12-03
That Guy with the Glasses (2008 - 2014)
three men laid off from a circuit city in 2007 built a website around a man who shouted at his childhood movies, and for six years it was the biggest video...
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2014-12-03
ArchitectureWeek (2000 - 2014)
five hundred and eighty three issues came out of eugene, oregon, the first on 17 may 2000 and the last on 3 december 2014. nobody wrote a farewell. the front...
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2014-12-02
Tipo (2003 - 2014)
on 11 november 2003 two israeli founders opened a messenger community for adults and put an 18+ section on it. children arrived instead, and by the end of 2005...
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2014-12-01
Microsoft Streets & Trips (1988 - 2014)
streets & trips was the desktop trip-planning cd-rom you bought at staples and installed once. you used it for the next four road trips before forgetting it...
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2014-12-01
Privet.ru (2006 - 2014)
privet.ru was a russian social network that launched as comby.ru in spring 2006 and rebranded under the new name on 10 june 2007. it crossed two million...
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2014-12-01
NTVMSNBC (2000 - 2014)
ntvmsnbc went online on 15 may 2000, a joint product of the turkish news channel ntv and msnbc, which its own about page described as the most visited news...
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2014-12-01
Microsoft Office Clip Art (1991 - 2014)
clip art was the drawer of pictures that came with the software. a cartoon man in a suit, a globe with a ring around it, indexed by keyword and dropped into a...
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2014-12-01
FilesTube (2007 - 2014)
it hosted nothing. it indexed everybody else's lockers and handed you an outbound link, and for a few years that made it the front door to rapidshare and...
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2014-12-01
Plasa.com (1998 - 2014)
telkom indonesia opened this portal in 1998 and ran it for sixteen years as the web half of the national phone company. free plasa.com mail addresses were the...
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2014-12-01
Fenopy (2006 - 2014)
a domain renewal that nobody paid, on purpose. fenopy launched around 2006 as the first torrent index that looked like a web 2.0 startup, and by march 2008 its...
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2014-12-01
Madden GIFERATOR (2014 - 2014)
for seventeen weeks in late 2014 a machine watched every nfl game and made memes about it. google's art, copy & code team built the madden giferator with ea...
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2014-11-30
Zeus Web Server (1995 - 2014)
two cambridge undergraduates wrote a web server in 1995 that beat apache on almost every benchmark anyone ran, and then tried to sell licenses for it. for...
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2014-11-20
Novell (1980 - 2014)
founded 1980 in utah. novell's netware became the default way to share files and printers across small office networks. peak market share around sixty-three...
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2014-11-14
UltimatePoker.com (2013 - 2014)
nevada legalized real-money online poker inside its own borders and ultimate gaming, owned through station casinos by the fertitta family, got the first...
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2014-11-14
Netflix Public API (2008 - 2014)
thirty-five million american subscribers and twelve and a half million elsewhere: by 2014 netflix did not need anybody else's app to introduce it to an...
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2014-11-12
Dalvik (2008 - 2014)
every android application on earth ran inside this thing between 2008 and 2014, and almost nobody who used one could have named it. dan bornstein built a...
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2014-11-11
Official Nintendo Magazine (1992 - 2014)
official nintendo magazine was the licensed british nintendo monthly, running from 1 october 1992 under a sequence of names and from 2006 under this one. emap...
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2014-11-11
Boerse.bz (2008 - 2014)
on 4 november 2014 about 400 police officers searched 121 homes in 14 german states, all over one forum. boerse.bz had grown out of gulli's closed download...
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2014-11-09
Voice of Russia (1929 - 2014)
thirty eight languages went off the air in stages across 2014. the station had been radio moscow since 1929, the loudest signal on shortwave for most of the...
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2014-11-07
Samaritans Radar (2014 - 2015)
a british suicide-prevention charity built a free twitter app that watched the timelines of everyone you followed and emailed you when a post matched its list...
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2014-11-06
Rev3Games (2012 - 2014)
adam sessler walked out of discovery digital networks in april 2014 and took the channel's reason for existing with him. rev3games had launched two years...
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2014-11-05
NetEase Weibo (2010 - 2014)
netease weibo was the fourth of china's four microblog services, behind sina, tencent and sohu. it launched in the spring of 2010 as t.163.com, hosted off...
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2014-11-04
Adobe Edge Code (2012 - 2014)
adobe edge code was a creative cloud code editor for html, css, and javascript that sat on top of the open source brackets project adobe had started in 2011....
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2014-11-01
Qwiki (2010 - 2014)
qwiki won techcrunch disrupt in september 2010 with an ipad app that turned wikipedia entries into narrated video montages. yahoo bought it for a reported...
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2014-11-01
Sohu Weibo (2010 - 2014)
sohu weibo was the fourth entry in china's short-lived four-portal microblog race. sina, tencent, netease and sohu each launched a weibo in 2009-2010. only...
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2014-11-01
BranchOut (2010 - 2014)
branchout was a professional network built on top of facebook, back when building on top of facebook looked like a business plan. it grew by mailing your...
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2014-11-01
KidZui (2008 - 2014)
the idea was that a child's internet could be a list. kidzui shipped a firefox build in 2008 that could reach nothing except urls a paid reviewer had already...
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2014-11-01
Netropolitan Club (2014 - 2014)
a composer and conductor in minnesota launched a social network on 15 september 2014 that cost nine thousand dollars to join and three thousand a year after...
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2014-11-01
Podcast Alley (2004 - 2014)
for most of a decade the closing seconds of an american podcast were a man asking you to go and vote for him. the place he wanted you to go was podcast alley,...
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2014-10-31
iVillage (1995 - 2014)
ivillage was a us women's portal that ran from 1995 to 2014. its march 1999 ipo was one of the loudest dot-com first-day pops, with shares priced at...
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2014-10-31
Maktoob (1998 - 2014)
the first arabic-language webmail anyone ran at scale. founded out of amman by samih toukan and hussam khoury in 1998. by 2009 it was the biggest...
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2014-10-31
Helix Universal Server (2002 - 2014)
the server side of streaming used to be a product you bought once, and realnetworks sold the one that spoke every format. helix universal server arrived in...
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2014-10-30
Listn (2013 - 2014)
eight days passed between beatport announcing it had bought listn and listn going dark. the app let you walk into a friend's music library and look around,...
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2014-10-29
Xbox Entertainment Studios (2012 - 2014)
microsoft hired the former president of cbs network television and gave her a studio in santa monica to make television for a games console. it lasted about...
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2014-10-25
Twitpic (2008 - 2014)
twitpic was the dominant photo host for twitter from 2008 to 2014, founded by noah everett as a stand-alone uploader before twitter had native images. at peak...
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2014-10-24
Haivl (2012 - 2014)
vietnam's ministry of information and communications fined haivl 205 million dong on 24 october 2014 and withdrew its license for good, citing content that...
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2014-10-23
Miso TV (2010 - 2014)
the television check-in was a real idea for about two years. miso launched it at sxsw in march 2010, raised money from google ventures and hearst and then...
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2014-10-20
Forte Agent (1994 - 2014)
forte agent was the canonical windows usenet newsreader from 1994 until usenet itself stopped being a place. charles dazler knuff's company forté inc shipped...
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2014-10-19
OhLife (2010 - 2014)
an email arrived in the evening and asked how'd your day go. you hit reply, typed whatever you had, and that was the entire product. shawn gupta and his...
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2014-10-16
Lotus Symphony (IBM) (2007 - 2014)
ibm took openoffice and put it inside an eclipse rich client shell. they called it a free corporate office suite and shipped it to enterprise customers. it was...
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2014-10-14
Venkman (2001 - 2014)
in april 2001 robert ginda started writing a javascript debugger for mozilla, in javascript, and it shipped inside the browser that october. venkman was the...
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2014-10-13
Amazon WebPay (2007 - 2014)
amazon webpay was a free peer to peer money transfer product that amazon launched in 2007 as a wing of amazon payments, the account layer for the amazon store....
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2014-10-13
Wreckamovie (2007 - 2014)
a group of finnish filmmakers made a free star trek parody called star wreck: in the pirkinning in 2005 by recruiting help over the internet, and it traveled a...
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2014-10-07
Redbox Instant (2013 - 2014)
redbox instant was verizon and outerwall's shared attempt to build a netflix competitor. it launched on 14 march 2013 at 8 dollars a month for unlimited...
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2014-10-06
Wireplay (1996 - 2014)
for about four years british telecom was in the video game business. wireplay opened to the public in june 1996, timed to euro 96, and let you dial a bt number...
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2014-10-04
Sulia (2009 - 2014)
ten million dollars went into a service that tried to find the people worth reading about any given subject, first by filtering twitter's firehose for other...
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2014-10-01
Quizilla (2002 - 2014)
the site where teenagers made and took user-generated personality quizzes, which became the trojan horse for fanfiction. launched 4 august 2002 by matthew...
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2014-10-01
Microsoft SideWinder (1995 - 2014)
microsoft sidewinder was the brand microsoft tried twice on pc gaming peripherals. first as joysticks from october 1995 to around 2003, then again as gaming...
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2014-10-01
CyberMentors (2009 - 2014)
gordon brown opened it in march 2009 and a million and a half british children eventually walked through it, most of them looking for someone to talk to about...
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2014-10-01
Westone Bit Entertainment (1986 - 2014)
ryuichi nishizawa and michishito ishizuka left sega in 1986 and called their company escape, then changed it because escape made them sound like people who...
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2014-09-30
Lotus 1-2-3 (1983 - 2014)
lotus 1-2-3 was the original killer app for the ibm pc. mitch kapor and jonathan sachs shipped it in january 1983, and for a decade nothing else mattered in...
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2014-09-30
Lotus SmartSuite (1992 - 2014)
lotus smartsuite was the bundle that stapled lotus 1-2-3 to wordpro and a handful of smaller productivity apps in one box. ibm bought lotus in 1995 for $3.2...
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2014-09-30
Orkut (2004 - 2014)
google's social network from 2004 to 2014. small in the US. enormous in brazil. then enormous in india. the most popular social network in two countries that...
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2014-09-30
MSN Autos (1995 - 2014)
carpoint launched as one of the first wave of microsoft web properties in october 1995, before the .com era was a category. it was a car-shopping portal that...
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2014-09-30
Airtime (2012 - 2014)
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning relaunched their friendship at the Airtime press event in june 2012, with Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart on the same stage. the...
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2014-09-30
Lotus Approach (1991 - 2014)
lotus approach was the end-user relational database in lotus smartsuite, originally a 1991 product from approach software inc in redwood city under jaleh...
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2014-09-30
ShiftyLook (2012 - 2014)
a webcomic studio inside bandai namco, opened to find out whether anything was left in the arcade cabinets nobody had touched since the eighties. it hired...
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2014-09-30
Lotus Freelance Graphics (1986 - 2014)
fifty kilobytes was a normal size for a freelance graphics presentation, which meant twenty of them fit on a single floppy disk and you could carry your entire...
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2014-09-30
PetitionOnline (1999 - 2014)
a 3d modeling software house in oregon ran the web's first well-known petition service for twelve years as a sideline. more than fifty thousand petitions and...
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2014-09-30
National Atlas of the United States (1997 - 2014)
in late 2013 mapping managers at the us geological survey decided to end the program, and the site they ended was getting three times the use of the site they...
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2014-09-30
Stagecast Creator (1998 - 2014)
larry tesler left apple in 1997 holding the rights to a kids' programming system the company had built and renamed twice, and he spent the next sixteen years...
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2014-09-28
Sky Sports News Radio (2010 - 2014)
leeds, the sky sports digital media centre, a room of radio people sat next to the television newsroom they took their copy from. four years of results and...
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2014-09-26
Monkey Quest (2011 - 2014)
monkey quest was nickelodeon's attempt at owning a kids world of its own instead of licensing one from a cartoon. it ran in a browser from march 2011, sold...
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2014-09-22
ジャンプLIVE (Jump LIVE) (2013 - 2014)
two issues shipped, in august and december 2013, and a third one was never delivered. shueisha built ジャンプLIVE as a fully digital special edition of weekly...
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2014-09-18
Petpet Park (2008 - 2014)
jumpstart games bought neopets in september 2014 and the spin-off did not survive the paperwork. petpet park went offline nine days after the sale closed, six...
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2014-09-15
AnimeNation (1995 - 2014)
the anime mail-order house out of clearwater florida. gene field opened it in 1995, ran it for twenty years, and shut the store in september 2014. the ask john...
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2014-09-15
Slando (2006 - 2014)
michael pennington and simon crookall sold gumtree to ebay in 2005 and built slando next, a free classifieds site aimed at russia and ukraine with ebay itself...
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2014-09-13
Shvoong (2005 - 2014)
an israeli site opened in 2005 offering to pay strangers a share of the advertising if they would write short summaries of books and articles, in whatever...
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2014-09-11
Loserkids.com (1999 - 2014)
kids kept telling blink-182 on tour that there was no skate shop anywhere near where they lived, so in june 1999 mark hoppus and tom delonge opened one on the...
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2014-09-10
Macworld (print) (1984 - 2014)
the apple-press print magazine of record. born february 1984, deliberately timed to ship the same month as the original macintosh, with $200,000 in seed...
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2014-09-08
Wallbase (2009 - 2014)
on 8 september 2014, at 13:54 gmt, something wrote an empty file over wallbase's index page, and that was the entire announcement. the site had indexed close...
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2014-09-05
MyFamily.com (1998 - 2014)
ancestry announced in the summer of 2014 that it was retiring myfamily, the private family-website service it had once renamed the entire company after. the...
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2014-09-04
Yebhi (2009 - 2014)
yebhi came out of an online shoe shop called bigshoebazaar and grew into one of india's early fashion e-tailers, selling clothes and accessories out of gurgaon...
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2014-09-04
Vizify (2011 - 2014)
portland, 2011: three software people decided the problem with your professional presence online was that all of it was text. vizify read your accounts and...
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2014-09-02
Squidoo (2005 - 2014)
squidoo was seth godin's revenue-share article platform, launched october 2005, where users built single-topic pages called "lenses" and earned a cut of the ad...
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2014-09-01
Plinky (2009 - 2014)
jason shellen's thing labs built plinky before it built brizzly. one question every weekday, answered with a paragraph or a photo, then pushed out to whatever...
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2014-09-01
Icebergs (2013 - 2014)
two barcelona designers, césar isern and albert pereta, built a private corner of the cloud where you could keep the images and notes a project runs on, and...
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2014-09-01
TheSwizzle (2012 - 2014)
scott kurnit built about.com and sold it for $724 million. he spent the early 2010s on a free tool that folded your promotional email into one daily digest and...
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2014-09-01
Pikimal (2010 - 2014)
thirteen people in pittsburgh built a search engine that refused to rank anything by popularity. you picked a category and then moved sliders to say how much...
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2014-09-01
Thaimail (1997 - 2014)
on 15 april 1997 a thai publishing company gave the country its first free email address, in thai, at a point when getting online in bangkok still meant a...
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2014-08-31
WorldsAway (1995 - 2014)
worldsaway was a 2d avatar city you paid by the hour to walk around in. fujitsu launched it on compuserve in 1995 and the dreamscape world became one of...
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2014-08-31
Svpply (2010 - 2014)
svpply was a place to save the things you wanted to own, a quiet feed of products picked by people whose taste you trusted. ebay bought it in 2012, took the...
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2014-08-31
GoInstant (2011 - 2014)
on 31 august 2014 a one-line notice replaced a company that had sold for a reported seventy million dollars two years earlier. four developers in halifax had...
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2014-08-29
YUI Library (2006 - 2014)
yahoo's open-source javascript framework. it shipped css resets and ajax widgets back when "frontend" still meant copy-pasting prototype.js into your html. it...
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2014-08-29
Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar (2013 - 2014)
ultima forever was a free-to-play action rpg for ios that took the frame of ultima iv, the game about the eight virtues, and hung a chest-and-key economy off...
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2014-08-26
showModalDialog (1997 - 2017)
chrome 37 shipped on 26 august 2014 without the one javascript call that could stop a page dead and wait for an answer. microsoft had put it in internet...
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2014-08-19
Campfire (37signals) (2006 - 2014)
campfire was 37signals's hosted chat room for teams, launched in 2006 before slack existed. simple enough to understand in a minute, persistent enough to...
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2014-08-17
Zip.ca (2004 - 2014)
zip.ca started shipping dvds to canadian mailboxes in february 2004 and spent a decade being the netflix canada did not have. it passed thirty thousand...
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2014-08-15
Heello (2011 - 2014)
heello was twitpic founder noah everett's attempt to hedge twitpic against twitter by building a small twitter clone of his own. it launched on august 10 2011,...
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2014-08-15
Myxer (2005 - 2014)
myxer was the free-tier answer to the paid-subscription ringtone empires jamba and thumbplay ran. founded in 2005 in deerfield beach florida by myk willis and...
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2014-08-15
Digital Region (2009 - 2014)
four south yorkshire councils, a regional development agency and brussels put more than ninety million pounds into a broadband network almost nobody bought....
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2014-08-13
TuneWiki (2008 - 2014)
tunewiki put the words on the screen in time with the music, on a phone, in 2008. it ran on almost every mobile platform of that moment and had more than ten...
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2014-08-12
Spickmich.de (2007 - 2014)
spickmich was the german teacher-rating site that three cologne students opened in spring 2007. registered pupils filled in their school and their teachers,...
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2014-08-12
Facebook Gifts (2012 - 2014)
on may 18, 2012, the day facebook went public, it bought a sixteen-person gifting app called karma. four months later that purchase reappeared as facebook...
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2014-08-10
Fotopedia (2009 - 2014)
fotopedia was the june 2009 paris photo platform built by five former apple engineers led by jean-marie hullot. members curated travel and wildlife photo...
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2014-08-06
ZipRealty (1999 - 2014)
ziprealty was a discount real-estate broker that ran an in-house salaried-agent model instead of the commission-only industry norm. it launched in 1999 and...
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2014-08-06
Norton Zone (2013 - 2014)
symantec supplied the obituary itself: security is one of the company's strengths, file sharing is not, and norton zone was a late entry to the market. general...
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2014-08-05
Justin.tv (2007 - 2014)
the lifecasting site that started as one guy with a webcam strapped to his head, broadcasting his life 24/7. it pivoted to a generic streaming platform. a...
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2014-08-04
Patch-Tag (2009 - 2014)
git won, and over the following decade everything built for the alternatives went down behind it. patch-tag was thomas hartman's one-man answer to the question...
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2014-08-01
Sonico (2007 - 2014)
argentina built a social network for the whole spanish-speaking world. sonico peaked above fifty million registrations across mexico, brazil, colombia, and the...
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2014-08-01
Sony Reader (2006 - 2014)
sony shipped an e-reader before amazon did. the librie launched in japan in 2004 and the prs-500 reached the united states in september 2006, more than a year...
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2014-08-01
Crime Library (1998 - 2014)
marilyn bardsley put crime library online in january 1998 as long-form writing about murders and the people who committed them, commissioned from working...
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2014-08-01
Blogter (2005 - 2014)
nobody shut this one down. the timeouts started in 2010, the support stopped answering, and by 2012 the hungarian blog platform was offline more often than it...
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2014-08-01
Skype protocol (2003 - 2014)
for most of a decade the cheapest long distance call in the world was carried by other people's computers. skype's protocol was undocumented and almost...
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2014-07-31
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (2007 - 2014)
vanguard launched in january 2007 from a team that had just built everquest. it shipped in a state that could not survive the wow era it was supposed to...
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2014-07-31
Yahoo Voices (2005 - 2014)
yahoo voices was the rebranded associated content platform, a pay-per-pageview content farm yahoo bought in may 2010 for about one hundred million dollars. at...
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2014-07-31
Ubuntu One (2009 - 2014)
ubuntu one was canonical's own dropbox. shipped alongside ubuntu 9.04 in may 2009 with 5 gb free storage and a linux-native sync client. added a music store...
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2014-07-31
Wizardry Online (2013 - 2014)
a japanese-developed western revival of the classic sir-tech wizardry dungeon crawl, ported by gamepot and published by SOE in january 2013. the pitch was...
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2014-07-31
Yahoo! Shine (2008 - 2014)
marissa mayer thought shine was not attractive, according to a source who talked to adweek in april 2014, and what she wanted instead was an online version of...
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2014-07-31
Repost.us (2011 - 2014)
8,500 publishers handed their articles to repost.us and more than 100,000 domains carried them, which reads like a working marketplace until you notice which...
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2014-07-31
Shortmail (2011 - 2014)
five hundred characters and no attachments. that was the entire product. 410 labs built shortmail in baltimore in 2011 on the theory that most email is too...
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2014-07-31
LearnStreet (2012 - 2014)
vinod khosla put a million dollars into learnstreet in 2012 and it was gone inside two years with no reason ever given. the only record of the shutdown is a...
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2014-07-30
FEARnet (2006 - 2014)
fearnet was a us-only thing at the cable-licensing layer. comcast plus lionsgate plus sony pictures launched it on halloween 2006 as a horror-focused...
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2014-07-30
Mixx (2007 - 2014)
the digg clone that pitched personalized content blending instead of pure popularity ranking. chris mcgill launched it in private beta on september 20 2007,...
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2014-07-29
Topica (1998 - 2014)
topica was a place to run an email list without a server of your own. it started in 1998, swallowed the old liszt list directory in 1999, and at its peak...
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2014-07-29
Sifteo Cubes (2011 - 2014)
the mit media lab prototype was called siftables and it played at ted in february 2009. david merrill and jeevan kalanithi turned it into a shipping product,...
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2014-07-28
Ya.ru (2008 - 2014)
yandex built a blogging platform in 2008 and gave it the shortest domain the company owned. you wrote, you uploaded photos through yandex.fotki, you joined...
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2014-07-26
House News (2012 - 2014)
hong kong's answer to the huffington post, running curation and blogs with several hundred contributing writers and almost no reporting staff of its own. by...
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2014-07-22
Café World (2009 - 2014)
café world launched on facebook 30 september 2009 and pulled 8 million players inside the first week. zynga ran it as its third-biggest title after farmville...
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2014-07-21
Download Accelerator Plus (1999 - 2014)
on a 56k modem a four megabyte mp3 took ten minutes and one dropped connection meant starting the whole thing again. dap opened several connections to the same...
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2014-07-18
Pixorial (2007 - 2014)
the domain still resolves, and it lands you on the product's own wikipedia article, which is a quieter epitaph than most companies manage to arrange for...
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2014-07-17
Nokia X (2014 - 2014)
the nokia x was nokia's brief detour into android. the x and the xl handsets (plus the slightly upgraded x+ on the same chassis) were unveiled at mwc on...
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2014-07-15
Encyclopedia of Taiwan (2005 - 2014)
five hundred and twenty million new taiwan dollars was the budget, and the original plan was a twenty-volume printed encyclopedia. what it turned into was a...
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2014-07-14
Cenci Journalism Project (2011 - 2014)
a twenty-two year old albanian-language student in beijing watched xinhua summarize what the foreign press had written about the wenzhou train crash, decided a...
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2014-07-10
Neversoft (1994 - 2014)
founded on 10 july 1994 and made defunct on 10 july 2014, twenty years to the day. in between, a skateboarding license nobody else especially wanted became...
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2014-07-04
Games for Windows Live (2007 - 2014)
microsoft's idea of bringing xbox live to pc games. it forced you to make a microsoft account just to save your single player game. it never worked properly....
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2014-07-02
Xobni (2006 - 2014)
xobni was inbox spelled backwards. an outlook sidebar that turned your mail archive into a people index before anybody else was doing that. yahoo paid over...
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2014-07-02
eCOST.com (1999 - 2014)
a closeout electronics retailer that pc mall started in torrance in 1999, cut loose in 2005 and took back six years later for a fraction of what it had been...
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2014-07-01
Age of Empires Online (2011 - 2014)
microsoft tried to take age of empires from a boxed rts to a free-to-play live-service mmo. the game shipped august 2011 with seven civilizations, an mmo...
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2014-07-01
Sony VAIO (1996 - 2014)
sony's pc brand. launched july 1996 with the pcv-90 desktop series in japan, became famous worldwide for the pcg-505 superslim laptop in 1997 and the c1...
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2014-07-01
Readmill (2011 - 2014)
henrik berggren and david kjelkerud shipped readmill from berlin in december 2011 as an ios app for reading ebooks and sharing highlights with the people you...
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2014-07-01
Ladies' Home Journal (1883 - 2014)
ladies' home journal was the curtis publishing service monthly that became the first american magazine to reach one million subscribers, in 1903. meredith...
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2014-07-01
Swell Radio (2013 - 2014)
thirteen months on the app store, then apple paid about $30 million for it and switched it off. concept.io built it to do for talk what pandora did for music:...
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2014-07-01
Airtight Games (2004 - 2014)
four people put in six thousand dollars each in the autumn of 2004, and that twenty-four thousand dollars was the entire starting capital of a console studio...
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2014-07-01
Samsung Music Hub (2012 - 2014)
australia was the only country that kept it. everywhere else samsung music hub stopped on 1 july 2014, two years and two months after it launched alongside the...
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2014-07-01
PALGN (2003 - 2014)
three hundred thousand people a month read an australian games site that existed because ign put its message boards behind a paywall in 2003 and the pal...
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2014-06-30
IWiW (2002 - 2014)
iwiw started in budapest in april 2002 as "wiw," was renamed "iwiw" in october 2005, was acquired by magyar telekom in april 2006 for about a billion forints,...
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2014-06-30
Lockerz (2009 - 2014)
lockerz was a points economy with a social network bolted onto it. you logged in daily, watched videos, answered polls, invited friends, and earned PTZ that...
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2014-06-30
me2day (2007 - 2014)
me2day launched in february 2007 in seoul as an independent korean microblogging service. nhn corporation, which would later rename itself naver, acquired it...
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2014-06-30
Sify Mail (2000 - 2014)
by august 2003 the company behind this inbox had over a thousand cybercafes open across india, which is the part of it worth remembering. satyam infoway was...
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2014-06-30
SmartPlanet (1999 - 2014)
30 june 2014 was the last day smartplanet published, and by then the name had been three different products sharing one domain. ziff davis put it up in 1999 as...
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2014-06-30
Little Eye Labs (2012 - 2014)
facebook's first indian acquisition was four engineers in bangalore who had built the tool android developers actually needed: a profiler that measured battery...
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2014-06-29
Quickoffice (1997 - 2014)
quickoffice was the mobile office viewer and editor that ran on every smartphone platform that existed before the iphone simplified the category. clients...
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2014-06-28
Aereo (2012 - 2014)
aereo's idea was almost a legal gag. each user rents one physical antenna in a warehouse, the antenna catches free over-the-air tv, the warehouse internet...
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2014-06-25
Springpad (2008 - 2014)
springpad was the pre-pinterest pinboard nobody remembers. you clipped something off the web and the app guessed whether it was a recipe or a product, then...
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2014-06-25
Google TV (2010 - 2014)
six american television networks decided, separately and within weeks of each other, that a browser running on a television was not allowed to load their...
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2014-06-23
Google Baraza (2010 - 2014)
on 25 october 2010 google launched a question and answer site for africa and named it with the swahili word for council. it ran on points: you earned them by...
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2014-06-20
The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age (2013 - 2014)
kabam launched the hobbit: armies of the third age on 21 march 2013 as a free-to-play browser strategy game tied to peter jackson's second hobbit film. it ran...
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2014-06-19
Digital Post Australia (2012 - 2014)
a private letterbox for your bills, built in australia by computershare and fuji xerox before the national postal service had one of its own. australia post...
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2014-06-18
Freshmeat / Freecode (1997 - 2014)
freshmeat was the release ticker for open-source software from about 1998 to the mid-2000s. patrick lenz launched it in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator...
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2014-06-18
Code Spaces (2007 - 2014)
on 17 june 2014 a stranger holding the keys to code spaces' amazon console asked for money to stop a ddos attack. the coventry company tried to lock the...
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2014-06-15
Rawporter (2011 - 2014)
five to twenty five dollars was what a publication paid for a picture on rawporter. kevin davis and rob gaige built it in charlotte, north carolina, as an app...
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2014-06-11
Myspace Music (2008 - 2014)
myspace music was the answer to the question of what happens when the worlds largest music-discovery social network gets all four major labels into one joint...
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2014-06-02
Wer-Kennt-Wen (2006 - 2014)
wer-kennt-wen was the koblenz-built german-language facebook clone that hit 9.4 million registered users in late 2011, got bought by rtl interactive for the...
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2014-06-01
BlackBerry PlayBook (2011 - 2014)
rim's ipad answer, launched april 19 2011 in north america at $499 for the 16gb model. it shipped without a native email client because the email had to come...
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2014-06-01
Bambuser (2007 - 2014)
bambuser was a swedish mobile live-streaming app out of stockholm. it launched in 2007 with the pitch that anyone with a smartphone could broadcast live video...
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2014-06-01
Graphicly (2009 - 2014)
graphicly wanted to be the store you bought comics from on a screen, and for two years it was the name people said next to comixology. it lost that fight and...
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2014-06-01
Willcom (1995 - 2014)
japan built a second mobile phone system alongside the real one, cheap and short ranged, and willcom was the operator that outlived the idea. it sold unlimited...
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2014-06-01
Funpic (2003 - 2014)
in coburg in april 2014 both directors of funpic.de ag left within twelve days, and nobody replaced them. the free host they walked away from had started in...
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2014-06-01
Wowloud (2011 - 2014)
on 1 june 2014 the first music streaming service malaysia built for itself stopped, and the page that replaced it did the unglamorous thing: it told premium...
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2014-05-31
GameSpy (1999 - 2014)
gamespy started in 1999 from an earlier quake server browser called qspy. it became the matchmaking middleware behind more than 800 game titles. you would...
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2014-05-31
MOG (2005 - 2014)
mog was on the right track at the wrong moment. it was a $10/month all-you-can-stream service in 2010, when most of the world was still on itunes purchases or...
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2014-05-31
Technorati (2002 - 2014)
technorati was the search engine for blogs back when blogs were a discrete category of the web, separate from news sites and separate from social media. dave...
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2014-05-30
Editorially (2013 - 2014)
editorially was the collaborative writing tool built by the designers who had built typekit and a book apart. markdown editing with threaded revision history...
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2014-05-29
Mythic Entertainment (1995 - 2014)
mythic entertainment was the fairfax virginia studio that mark jacobs and rob denton built around mid-1990s text muds before pivoting to graphical mmos with...
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2014-05-29
Symantec pcAnywhere (1986 - 2014)
the remote desktop standard before remote desktop was a windows feature. pcanywhere 1.0 shipped in 1986 from dynamic microprocessor associates for dos....
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2014-05-28
TrueCrypt (2004 - 2014)
the free disk encryption tool that ran on windows and macos and linux for ten years and was the default answer for full-disk and container encryption when you...
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2014-05-28
Musicload (2003 - 2014)
t-online opened it in october 2003 and for a few years it was arguing with itunes over which of them led the german download market. it sold drm-locked wma...
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2014-05-23
Docking@Home (2006 - 2014)
a volunteer computing project on the boinc platform, hosted by the university of delaware under michela taufer and paid for by the nsf and the nih. it handed...
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2014-05-22
Son of the Bronx (2011 - 2014)
blogger started pulling posts off the site in may 2014 and warned that more removals were coming. douglas pucci had been compiling nielsen ratings for american...
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2014-05-21
Jaleco (1974 - 2014)
jaleco started in 1974 as japan leisure company, building the machines that filled arcades rather than the games that ran on them. the name people remember...
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2014-05-20
Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (2005 - 2014)
nintendo wi-fi connection was nintendo's first real consumer online service. it launched with mario kart ds in november 2005 and ran on gamespy infrastructure...
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2014-05-20
Tokobagus (2005 - 2014)
two dutch founders started a classifieds site in denpasar in 2005 and turned it into the address indonesians typed when they wanted to sell a car. by 2013 it...
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2014-05-20
Wii Speak (2008 - 2014)
wii speak was a microphone bar you hung off the television so an entire room could talk to an entire other room, which is not how anybody else was building...
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2014-05-19
ex.fm (2010 - 2014)
ex.fm started life as extension.fm, a browser add-on out of new york in 2010. it scanned whatever webpage you were on for mp3 files, mostly music blogs, and...
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2014-05-17
Dropjack (2007 - 2014)
a canadian search-engine company called jayde online launched a digg clone in 2007 and named the votes jacks. for a few years dropjack ran the way the whole...
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2014-05-16
Silicon Knights (1992 - 2014)
silicon knights spent twenty two years in st. catharines, ontario, and made one game that people still talk about. eternal darkness in 2002 pretended to break...
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2014-05-16
Loom (2013 - 2014)
twenty-nine days is the gap between the acquisition notice and the shutdown. dropbox bought loom on 17 april 2014, one week after launching carousel, a photo...
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2014-05-15
RubyForge (2003 - 2014)
ruby central needed somewhere to put open source ruby projects, so in july 2003 a small consultancy stood up a fork of sourceforge and called it rubyforge....
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2014-05-12
Lord of Ultima (2010 - 2014)
lord of ultima was a free browser strategy game that ea phenomic built in germany and released in april 2010, carrying a name from richard garriott's series...
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2014-05-11
StackMob (2010 - 2014)
five months. that is how long stackmob lasted inside paypal, which bought it in december 2013 and announced the shutdown on 12 february 2014. the pitch had...
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2014-05-11
Mekusharim (2004 - 2014)
three party promoters in tel aviv put about forty thousand shekels into a website and opened it in july 2004 with six registered users. by 2007 mekusharim was...
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2014-05-09
Facebook Poke (2012 - 2014)
poke was facebook's first snapchat clone. ios only, shipped on december 21 2012 about a week after snapchat rejected facebook's reported $3 billion buyout. you...
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2014-05-09
Facebook Camera (2012 - 2014)
facebook camera was a standalone iphone app from facebook that let you shoot, filter, batch upload, and browse a feed of friend photos. it launched on may 24...
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2014-05-06
HitBliss (2013 - 2014)
eight to ten minutes of commercials bought you a new release. the catch was that the software watched back, with a meter you had to click and a trust score...
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2014-05-06
Userscripts.org (2005 - 2014)
jesse andrews built the place greasemonkey scripts lived in, and in 2010 he posted that it had gone into maintenance mode and asked for somebody to take it...
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2014-05-01
Skyfire (2008 - 2014)
skyfire was the 2008-2014 mobile browser that solved iphone-cant-play-flash by rendering flash on a proprietary server farm and streaming a video back to the...
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2014-05-01
Cooliris (2006 - 2014)
the 3D wall plugin that made image search look like a movie scene for two years. installed fifty million times across the major browsers, won a crunchies award...
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2014-05-01
EditGrid (2006 - 2014)
a web spreadsheet out of a small hong kong company that, by most accounts, was better than google's: live data feeds and a real api, collaborative in the...
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2014-05-01
Square Wallet (2011 - 2014)
square wallet let you pay at a cafe by giving your name. no phone out, no tap, your face and your name were the checkout. for the people who had it, it felt...
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2014-05-01
Itsmy (2006 - 2014)
a munich company built a social network for the phone browser in 2006, when that meant a two inch screen and a data plan billed by the kilobyte. it reached...
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2014-05-01
Cuevana (2009 - 2014)
three students in argentina put cuevana online on 1 october 2009 and within two years it was how a large part of latin america watched american television. it...
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2014-05-01
Starmatic (2012 - 2014)
a paris company put starmatic on the app store on 5 september 2012, an iphone-only photo app built around a plastic kodak camera from 1959, down to the icon...
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2014-05-01
Yellowikis (2005 - 2014)
a fifteen year old noticed that wikipedia kept deleting the small businesses she looked up, and told her father the entries needed somewhere else to live....
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2014-05-01
Appetas (2012 - 2014)
a twenty five thousand dollar hackathon prize in 2012 paid two ex-microsoft engineers to go and build restaurant websites, and two years later google bought...
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2014-05-01
gogoyoko (2009 - 2014)
reykjavik, december 2007: two musicians and one of the people who built eve online started a music store on the premise that the artist should keep almost all...
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2014-05-01
Web Slices (2008 - 2014)
in march 2008 microsoft shipped a way to subscribe to one corner of a web page instead of to the whole site. you marked a region of your html with a class,...
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2014-04-30
5min.com (2007 - 2014)
5min was a short instructional video network founded in tel aviv in 2007 by ran harnevo. by 2010 it was syndicating short how-to clips across a wide partner...
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2014-04-30
Bloom.fm (2013 - 2014)
bloom.fm was a british music app that tried a middle path between buying songs and paying a flat streaming fee. it let you rent music. a pound a month rented...
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2014-04-30
BerliOS (2000 - 2014)
the fraunhofer institute opened berlios in january 2000 so that german and european open source work would have somewhere to live that was not a californian...
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2014-04-30
Qik (2007 - 2014)
qik was a live video app from 2007 that pushed a stream off a phone and onto a web page while the phone was still pointed at the thing, back when the phone...
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2014-04-30
まほうつかいの箱 (2009 - 2014)
315 yen a month got you into a cafe that does not exist. type-moon built its official phone site in 2009 as アーネンエルベ, the coffee shop that turns up inside kara...
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2014-04-30
Slidecast (2007 - 2014)
seven years after slideshare invented it, the slidecast was switched off in two stages during 2014: you could no longer make one after 28 february, and on 30...
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2014-04-28
Last.fm (the social era) (2002 - 2014)
the music scrobbling site. you installed an audioscrobbler plugin in winamp or foobar2000. it tracked every song you played. the site charted your taste,...
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2014-04-24
Impulse (2008 - 2014)
impulse was stardock's attempt to sell pc games without treating the buyer as a suspect. it launched in 2008 against a steam that had already won the argument,...
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2014-04-23
OpenNI (2010 - 2014)
apple paid around $360 million for primesense on 24 november 2013, and primesense was the member holding the openni consortium together. openni.org went...
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2014-04-22
QVOD (Kuaibo) (2007 - 2014)
qvod, known in chinese as kuaibo, was a video player out of shenzhen that turned every machine running it into a node in one enormous streaming swarm. it...
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2014-04-22
Wiser.org (2007 - 2014)
wiser.org launched on earth day 2007 as wiserearth, an open directory of the hundred thousand odd groups paul hawken had cataloged while writing blessed...
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2014-04-22
WiserEarth (2007 - 2014)
paul hawken spent years collecting business cards from environmental and social justice groups, could not find a list of them anywhere, and decided the list...
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2014-04-19
Nike+ FuelBand (2012 - 2014)
nike+ fuelband was the wrist tracker that converted accelerometer data into a made-up unit called nikefuel and showed it back on a black-bracelet LED...
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2014-04-18
Twitter Music (2013 - 2014)
twitter music launched at coachella in april 2013 and shut down april 18, 2014, one year to the day. it was built on the we are hunted acquisition, played...
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2014-04-16
TelexFree (2012 - 2014)
telexfree pretended to sell voip calling cards. about two percent of the revenue came from selling cards. the other ninety-eight percent came from recruiting...
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2014-04-15
Kerpoof (2006 - 2014)
four engineers in boulder put fifty thousand dollars of their own money into a drawing program for small children and agreed to take no salary for a year....
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2014-04-14
Forrst (2010 - 2014)
forrst was the invite-only room where designers and developers showed unfinished work and asked to be told the truth about it. kyle bragger started it as a...
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2014-04-08
MSN Messenger (1999 - 2014)
the messenger of every Turkish high school student and university student from 2002 to 2010. the nudge shook your screen and your heart. appear-offline was a...
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2014-04-08
Windows XP (2001 - 2014)
windows xp shipped in october 2001 and refused to leave for thirteen years. it sat under bliss, the napa hill that became the most-seen photograph on earth....
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2014-04-04
Television Without Pity (1998 - 2014)
twop was the site that taught a generation of internet writers to recap a tv episode by mocking it scene-by-scene. nbcuniversal bought it in 2007 because the...
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2014-04-04
DailyCandy (2000 - 2014)
dailycandy was a daily email newsletter dany levy started in march 2000 from her west village apartment with seven hundred subscribers. by 2008 it had grown to...
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2014-04-04
Sevenload (2006 - 2014)
sevenload was germany's attempt at a domestic youtube. founded in cologne in april 2006 by ibrahim evsan with two cofounders, it grew to twelve language...
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2014-04-04
My Damn Channel (2007 - 2014)
rob barnett came out of eleven years of programming at mtv and vh1 and started my damn channel with warren chao on 31 july 2007, when the open question was...
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2014-04-01
Mevio (2004 - 2014)
mevio was the san francisco podcast network founded on 1 october 2004 as podshow inc. by adam curry and ron bloom. it opened as the flagship ad network of the...
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2014-04-01
Farecast (2003 - 2014)
it answered one question, which was whether to buy the ticket today or wait, and it attached a confidence figure so you could argue with it. behind that sat...
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2014-04-01
Ryushare (2012 - 2014)
132 billion dong moved from a domestic payments company into one man's account in bình dương province between january 2013 and march 2014, and that ledger is...
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2014-04-01
Blottr (2010 - 2014)
adam baker started blottr in august 2010 to let anyone in london file a news story, and inside a year it had over five thousand contributors and 1.4 million...
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2014-04-01
Digital Chocolate (2003 - 2014)
trip hawkins founded electronic arts, then 3do, then in october 2003 a company for games on phones that had no touchscreen and no store to download from....
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2014-04-01
Find Your FaceMate (2011 - 2014)
a launch party at stk in the meatpacking district, july 2012, samantha ronson on the decks and celebrity faces run through the matcher for the cameras. the...
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2014-03-31
Free Realms (2009 - 2014)
free realms was sony online entertainment's bid to build the disney-tier kid mmo on the playstation 3 and the pc at the same time. it shipped on april 28, 2009...
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2014-03-31
Mochi Media (2005 - 2014)
mochi media was the san francisco flash-game distribution and ad-serving network founded in 2005 by bob ippolito and jameson hsu. it claimed about 140 million...
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2014-03-31
IntoNow (2011 - 2014)
adam cahan's team shipped intonow at the end of january 2011 as a shazam-for-television app. hold your phone up to any show and it told you what was on. yahoo...
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2014-03-31
Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures (2010 - 2014)
a browser-based virtual world for kids who watched the animated clone wars show on cartoon network. sony online entertainment ran it as a licensed free-to-play...
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2014-03-31
123people (2007 - 2014)
123people opened in vienna on 1 july 2007 and did exactly one thing. you typed a person's name, it went out to more than two hundred sources at once, and it...
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2014-03-31
Nintendo Video (2011 - 2014)
nintendo put a free video app on the 3ds and then did the choosing for you. spotpass pulled four shorts at a time down onto the sd card while the console sat...
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2014-03-31
Heroes of Might and Magic Online (2008 - 2014)
tq digital built a chinese mmo out of heroes iii and netdragon published it, three years later than announced, opening on 30 may 2008. it stacked three games...
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2014-03-31
Diesel eBooks (2004 - 2014)
diesel sold ebooks in epub for a decade, which meant it sold to everyone except kindle owners and was therefore fighting over the smaller half of a market...
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2014-03-31
Data Becker (1981 - 2014)
39 million marks a year by 1984, three years after two brothers opened a computer accessories shop in düsseldorf. the books were the thing: blue-spined...
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2014-03-31
月刊コミックラッシュ (2004 - 2014)
on 26 january 2011 a japanese manga magazine printed its last issue and did not die. it moved to a website, charged 450 yen a month for the current number and...
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2014-03-31
DreamBook (1997 - 2014)
half a million personal websites once ended with a link that said sign my guestbook, and a very large share of those books lived on one server run by the...
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2014-03-31
SecondSync (2011 - 2014)
every tweet sent at a british television show passed through a small company in london and bristol for about three years, and the league table it produced is...
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2014-03-31
NHS Direct (1998 - 2014)
england had one number for the question you could not quite justify an ambulance over. 0845 46 47 reached a nurse at any hour of any day, from march 1998...
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2014-03-30
Distill (2012 - 2014)
yahoo announced the purchase on 13 february 2014 and what it had bought was seven engineers. the product they had spent two years on, a video call with a...
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2014-03-28
Widgetbox (2006 - 2014)
widgetbox was the shop where people who could not write code got something moving onto their page. you picked a widget, copied a block of html, and pasted it...
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2014-03-28
Sparktop (2003 - 2014)
a free website for eight to twelve year olds with dyslexia and other learning differences, put online in october 2003 by the charles and helen schwab...
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2014-03-28
Magic: The Gathering - Tactics (2011 - 2014)
sony online entertainment held a wizards of the coast license and built something out of it that almost nobody had asked for: magic played as a grid tactics...
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2014-03-26
Totalmovie (2011 - 2014)
ninety-nine pesos a month bought a catalog that ran across forty latin american markets, and by the end of 2012 totalmovie had 1.9 million registered accounts...
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2014-03-26
BookLamp (2007 - 2014)
boise, idaho is not where book recommendation engines come from, which is part of why aaron stanton had to fly to california and wait outside google's offices...
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2014-03-25
Epinions (1999 - 2018)
epinions launched in september 1999 in mountain view, founded by nirav tolia and four cofounders with eight million dollars from benchmark and august capital....
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2014-03-22
Lost Zombies (2008 - 2014)
lost zombies was a social network with exactly one story in it. you signed up, and everything you posted had to fit a fictional timeline where a flu mutated in...
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2014-03-21
Streamzoo (2011 - 2014)
streamzoo was instagram with badges. you shared a photo into a "stream" (a themed community), earned badges for contributions, leveled up. launched april 2011,...
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2014-03-21
Jike (2010 - 2014)
jike opened in june 2010 as people's search, a search engine owned by the people's daily and handed to deng yaping, who had four olympic golds at table tennis...
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2014-03-14
Popcorn Time (2014 - 2014)
the app that made piracy look like netflix. it wrapped the whole torrent grind inside one clean grid of movie posters you could press play on. its own creators...
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2014-03-14
TextDrive (2004 - 2014)
two hundred people paid two hundred dollars each in 2004 to buy the hardware a hosting company would run on, and dean allen called them the vc200. the promise...
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2014-03-12
Fitbit Force (2013 - 2014)
fitbit force was a wristband activity tracker released in october 2013 at $129.95 as the upgrade from the fitbit flex. by late january 2014 there were a few...
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2014-03-11
Intel AppUp (2010 - 2014)
for four years intel ran an app store. it opened in january 2010 for netbooks, back when a netbook was a product category rather than a punchline, widened to...
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2014-03-07
OLPC XO-1 (2007 - 2014)
the xo-1 was the first hardware shipped under the one laptop per child initiative announced at davos in 2005 by nicholas negroponte. the device had a green and...
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2014-03-05
QIP (2005 - 2014)
qip stood for quiet internet pager and shipped its first build on november 1 2005 from ilgam zyulkorneev as a lightweight icq-compatible windows client. it...
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2014-03-05
MetroTwit (2010 - 2014)
long zheng posted a screenshot of a metro-styled twitter client for windows in march 2010 and had a closed beta running inside the month. with david golden and...
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2014-03-03
My Opera (2001 - 2014)
opera software ran a side-community for opera users that started in 2001 as a forum and grew into a blog platform with a free webmail service attached. it...
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2014-03-03
[email protected] (2005 - 2014)
every mail.ru mailbox came with a blog whether the owner wanted one or not, and that single decision made a russian blogging platform bigger than livejournal...
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2014-03-01
Hunch (2009 - 2014)
hunch launched in 2009 as a question game that tried to predict what you would like, from movies to gadgets, out of a taste graph built from your answers....
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2014-03-01
Zootool (2008 - 2014)
zootool was a bookmarking service that treated your saved links as pictures. instead of a list of blue text it gave you a grid of thumbnails, the images and...
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2014-03-01
BackWeb Technologies (1995 - 2014)
push was the idea that the web should come to you instead of you going to it, and for about eighteen months in the late nineties three companies were going to...
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2014-03-01
Flirtomatic (2005 - 2014)
nokia asked a design agency for five mobile ideas, somebody in the room noticed that what they had been describing all afternoon was flirting, and that is the...
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2014-03-01
Google Offers (2011 - 2014)
google tried to buy groupon for around six billion dollars in december 2010 and got turned down, so it built its own. google offers opened on 26 may 2011 with...
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2014-03-01
Series Yonkis (2007 - 2014)
series yonkis was where spain watched television for most of a decade. it hosted nothing itself. it kept an index of links to files sitting on other people's...
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2014-03-01
Wildfire Interactive (2008 - 2014)
a $250,000 grant from the facebook fund in 2008 turned into a company that ran the promotions behind half the brand pages on facebook, and google bought it on...
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2014-03-01
YiGG (2006 - 2014)
digg.de was the original address, and the name had to change for legal reasons before the site was two years old. from 1 january 2006 yigg ran the digg model...
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2014-03-01
Pegasus News (2006 - 2014)
dallas got a personalized local news site in december 2006, years before anyone had a settled name for that. pegasus news asked for your zip code and your...
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2014-03-01
GreenXchange (2010 - 2014)
davos, january 2010: nike used its slot at the world economic forum to launch a marketplace where a company could publish a patent with a standing license...
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2014-03
AIBO (1999 - 2014)
sony put the first aibo out on may 11 1999 at two hundred and fifty thousand yen and the japanese run of three thousand sold out online in twenty minutes. the...
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2014-02-28
Mt. Gox (2010 - 2014)
mt. gox was the bitcoin exchange that turned from a magic the gathering card-trading site into the place where seventy percent of the world's bitcoin moved....
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2014-02-28
Call of Duty: Elite (2011 - 2014)
two million people were paying activision fifty dollars a year to look at their own kill statistics. elite launched on 8 november 2011 next to modern warfare 3...
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2014-02-28
Shomei TV (2008 - 2014)
five thousand yen was the floor, ten thousand the ceiling, and that price tag arrived on a petition site that had launched in march 2008 letting anyone start a...
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2014-02-28
Donna (2013 - 2014)
yahoo did not want the app. it wanted the five people who built it, and it put them on yahoo mail. donna lasted eight months in the app store, long enough to...
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2014-02-27
Pictures for Sad Children (2007 - 2014)
pictures for sad children ran from 2007 to 2014, a black-and-white webcomic about depression with a ghost named paul in it. a 2012 kickstarter for a print...
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2014-02-25
Google Chrome Frame (2009 - 2014)
google's answer to internet explorer 6 was not to ask people to switch browsers, but to smuggle chrome inside the browser they were stuck with. a page added...
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2014-02-24
Facebook Email (2010 - 2014)
in 2010 facebook decided everyone needed a facebook.com email address and gave one to every user without asking. in 2012 it changed the address listed on your...
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2014-02-21
Cloud Party (2012 - 2014)
a browser tab was the entire installation, which in 2012 was the whole argument. cloud party put a user-built 3d world on webgl at a moment when the obvious...
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2014-02-19
2channel (2ch.net) (1999 - 2014)
2channel was japan's canonical anonymous textboard, launched may 30 1999 by hiroyuki nishimura from a college apartment in arkansas. it ran threaded boards...
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2014-02-18
Irrational Games (1997 - 2014)
irrational was founded in december 1997 by ken levine and two other ex-looking-glass devs in quincy, massachusetts. system shock 2 in 1999 was the debut,...
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2014-02-18
Banshee (2005 - 2014)
banshee was the linux music player that got everything right except the runtime it was built on. for a while it was ambitious and good, the closest the gnome...
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2014-02-14
Dhingana (2007 - 2014)
in december 2013 the biggest music label in india said it would not renew, and by the middle of february the biggest music streaming service in india had...
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2014-02-11
Utopia (2014 - 2014)
utopia opened on 3 february 2014, put together by people connected to black market reloaded, and dutch police took it off the network eight days later....
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2014-02-10
Flappy Bird (2013 - 2014)
flappy bird was a free mobile game by a vietnamese developer named dong nguyen. it was released in may 2013, became a global obsession in january 2014, and was...
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2014-02-07
Open Diary (1998 - 2014)
open diary was the first online journaling site on the web, launched october 20, 1998 by bruce ableson with his wife susan, who used the handles diarymaster...
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2014-02-07
Google Schemer (2011 - 2014)
a google side project from the post-buzz post-wave era that tried to turn bucket lists into a social graph. invite-only at launch in december 2011, last...
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2014-02-07
World Cyber Games (2000 - 2014)
wcg was the samsung-backed korean attempt to build an olympics for video games. it ran annually from 2000 to 2013 across counter-strike and warcraft iii and...
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2014-02-07
Videogum (2008 - 2014)
a pop-culture blog run as the sister site to stereogum from april 2008, built almost entirely on the voice of one writer. gabe delahaye recapped television and...
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2014-02-07
McWorld (2008 - 2014)
a code printed on a happy meal box was the currency of this one. mcdonald's launched mcworld on happymeal.com in 2008, a flash virtual world where children...
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2014-02-05
Tap Tap Revenge (2008 - 2014)
nate true wrote it for a jailbroken iphone in september 2007, before apple had shipped a way for anyone to write anything. it was bought and renamed, and it...
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2014-02-03
ValueClick (1998 - 2014)
valueclick was one of the original dot-com era online ad networks, founded in 1998 in westlake village, california by brian coryat and built around the...
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2014-02-01
Willow Garage (2006 - 2014)
willow garage was a private robotics research lab in menlo park, funded personally by scott hassan from 2006 through early 2014. it built the pr2 humanoid...
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2014-02-01
Volunia (2012 - 2014)
volunia was an italian search engine built in padua by massimo marchiori, whose 1997 work on hyper search sits in the citation trail behind pagerank. it opened...
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2014-02-01
The Global Mail (2012 - 2014)
an australian newsroom with no advertising and no paywall, funded by one man who had promised five years and delivered two. it launched on 6 february 2012, won...
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2014-02-01
myOpenID (2006 - 2014)
janrain ran the best known free openid provider on the web, then announced in september 2013 that the standard had lost. the login button people actually...
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2014-02-01
Splashup (2007 - 2014)
two people in y combinator's summer 2007 batch built a photoshop clone that ran inside a flash plugin, with real layers and a canvas close enough to the...
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2014-02-01
vTap (2007 - 2014)
$28 million went into veveo before vtap shipped in september 2007, and what it bought was a video search engine that narrowed its results on every keypress,...
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2014-01-31
Bump (2009 - 2014)
bump launched in march 2009 with a gimmick that turned out to be a real product. tap two phones together and the app would exchange contact cards or photos...
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2014-01-31
Jajah (2005 - 2014)
jajah was a small austrian voip company that built a clever trick. you typed your own phone number and the other person's phone number into a web form, the...
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2014-01-31
Microsoft InfoPath (2003 - 2014)
infopath was microsoft's xml-based electronic-forms designer. it shipped as part of office 2003 on 21 october 2003 and was killed on 31 january 2014 when...
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2014-01-31
CrossLoop (2006 - 2014)
crossloop was a freemium screen-sharing tool from a monterey california startup that ran 2006 to 2014. tom rolander and mrinal desai started it after...
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2014-01-31
Manymoon (2009 - 2014)
manymoon was a shared task-and-project tracker from 2009 that got big by being one of the first hits in google's apps marketplace, sitting right next to gmail....
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2014-01-31
WWE Classics on Demand (2004 - 2014)
wwe owns one of the largest privately held video archives on earth, well past 100,000 hours running back to the 1950s and swollen further by buying wcw and ecw...
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2014-01-31
INQ Mobile (2008 - 2014)
a small london outfit inside hutchison whampoa built the phone everyone else was still writing rumor pieces about. the inq1 shipped in december 2008 with...
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2014-01-31
Google Notifier (2005 - 2014)
for nine years the fastest way to learn you had mail was a small envelope in the corner of your screen, put there by a program whose only job was watching one...
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2014-01-30
Sketchfu (2007 - 2014)
the goodbye was written in the first person and it thanked the volunteer moderators by their shared account name. sketchfu ran about seven years as a place to...
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2014-01-28
MAG (2010 - 2014)
two hundred and fifty six players in a single battle, on a playstation 3, in january 2010. zipper interactive built mag as a persistent territorial war between...
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2014-01-28
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation (2008 - 2014)
the box came with a bluetooth headset, because the entire game was voice and the entire game was online. confrontation had no campaign, only sixteen-player...
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2014-01-27
Mahalo (2007 - 2014)
mahalo's pitch was that humans could outperform google's algorithm at building search results. google disagreed within four years. jason calacanis ran the...
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2014-01-22
Mythos (2007 - 2014)
mythos was a free-to-play diablo clone built by flagship studios as a side project alongside the doomed hellgate: london. when flagship collapsed in july 2008,...
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2014-01-21
Outbox (2012 - 2014)
outbox tried to digitize the us physical mail stream. drivers picked up envelopes from a customer's mailbox three days a week, scanned the contents at a...
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2014-01-21
Canvas Networks (2010 - 2014)
canvas was christopher poole's serious startup after 4chan. an image-remix community built with proper accounts and moderation on top of a real business plan....
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2014-01-20
Legacy Locker (2009 - 2014)
three hundred dollars bought you a lifetime, and the lifetime lasted until november 2013, when passwordbox bought the company and gave everyone sixty days....
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2014-01-20
TorChat (2007 - 2014)
nothing was announced. the last commit landed on 20 january 2014 and nothing came after it, which is how a messenger with a thousand stars on github actually...
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2014-01-18
Trickster Online (2003 - 2014)
a 2d isometric korean mmo from 2003 where you played an animal and dug holes. the drill system gave it a second way to play that involved no fighting at all,...
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2014-01-16
Letternet (1997 - 2014)
a national post office ran a pen-pal club for sixteen years and it worked. letternet matched strangers by language and country, then posted you the address so...
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2014-01-12
Blockbuster (1985 - 2014)
blockbuster opened its first store in dallas in october 1985 and grew into a 9000-store chain by the mid-2000s. it passed on buying netflix for fifty million...
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2014-01-07
MOBTV (2008 - 2014)
mediacorp online broadband television launched in august 2008 as singapore's national broadcaster selling its own back catalog by subscription, streamed or...
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2014-01-06
Yahoo! omg! (2007 - 2014)
yahoo omg was the celebrity gossip property yahoo built in 2007, when celebrity gossip was a thing portals built whole verticals around. it pulled from access...
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2014-01-02
Ptch (2012 - 2014)
a mobile video remix app spun out of dreamworks animation's cto office, launched november 2012, acquired by yahoo december 2013 in an acqui-hire and shut down...
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2014-01-02
Conduit toolbar (2005 - 2014)
conduit let anybody build a browser toolbar for free and then made its money on the search box inside it. by 2010 more than a hundred million of those toolbars...
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2014-01-01
Cleverbot (1997 - 2014)
the chatbot that learned from every conversation it ever had. it ran on recycled human responses, which is why it would say something weirdly perfect, then...
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2014-01-01
Symbian OS (1998 - 2014)
the OS that ran every nokia smartphone from about 2000 to 2011. peak market share over 60 percent globally in 2007. then iphone, then android, then the burning...
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2014-01-01
Gateway Computers (1985 - 2014)
gateway 2000 was started in 1985 in a sioux city farmhouse by ted waitt and mike hammond, sold mail-order pcs in boxes printed with holstein cow markings, and...
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2014-01-01
hakia (2004 - 2014)
a turkish nuclear physicist and a finnish economist launched a semantic search engine out of new york in 2004. it wanted to answer questions using ontology and...
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2014-01-01
MetaCrawler (1995 - 2014)
metacrawler was the first search box that did not search anything itself. erik selberg built it as a grad-school project at the university of washington, wired...
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2014-01-01
Miranda IM (2000 - 2014)
miranda was the client you ran when you were tired of keeping two messengers open. it started life as a lightweight icq clone and grew into a plugin box that...
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2014-01-01
SocialGO (2007 - 2014)
socialgo was a london company's answer to ning, a hosted builder that let you make your own social network without writing any code. it listed on the aim...
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2014-01-01
Ajeeb.com (2000 - 2014)
the web was in english and most of the arab world was not, so sakhr software pointed its machine-translation engine at the gap and opened a portal in november...
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2014-01-01
Anime Web Turnpike (1995 - 2014)
jay fubler harvey put the anime web turnpike online in august 1995 as a hub: a page of links to other people's anime and manga sites, sorted by category, with...
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2014-01-01
Goom Radio (2008 - 2014)
two senior people walked out of nrj, france's biggest top 40 network, to build the same thing with no transmitters in it. sixteen million dollars of venture...
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2014-01-01
Everloop (2011 - 2014)
everloop was a social network for eight to thirteen year olds, built to be legal under coppa during the years when every american parent had just worked out...
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2014-01-01
Scirus (2001 - 2014)
scirus was elsevier's free science search engine, launched in 2001 and reaching 167 million indexed pages. it looked past journals into patents and the pages...
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2014-01-01
Mozilla Labs (2006 - 2014)
december 2013 is the last post on the mozilla labs blog, and nobody ever wrote a final one. the incubator opened in august 2006 and had quietly stopped...
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2014-01-01
True.com (2003 - 2014)
forty-three million member records were the most valuable thing left when true beginnings went into chapter 11 in 2013, and they turned out to be the one asset...
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2014-01-01
ArchLord (2005 - 2014)
one player per server, for four weeks at a time, with a castle and the ability to change the weather over everyone else's heads. that was the whole pitch of...
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2014-01-01
Sybase (1984 - 2014)
four people started it in berkeley in 1984 and built the database that ran wall street trading floors through the nineties. in 1988 they licensed the engine to...
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2014-01-01
Chromaroma (2010 - 2014)
london's transport network was the board. chromaroma read the journey history off your registered oyster card and scored it, so that going to work became...
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2014-01-01
Impermium (2010 - 2014)
1.5 million websites were paying impermium to decide which of their new signups were real people, tumblr and disqus among them. in january 2014 google bought...
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2014-01-01
Groovle (2007 - 2014)
google filed a complaint with the national arbitration forum on 6 november 2009 arguing that groovle.com sat two letters away from its own name. the panel...
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2014
Koolmuzone (2004 - 2014)
koolmuzone was a pakistani music blog started in 2004 by hamad dar, one person covering the mainstream and the underground out of the same inbox. unsigned...
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2013-12-31
AllThingsD (2007 - 2013)
allthingsd was the wall street journal tech blog that kara swisher and walt mossberg ran from 2007 to 2013, an offshoot of the d conference series the two had...
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2013-12-31
3Com (1979 - 2013)
3com was the network-hardware company robert metcalfe started in 1979 to sell ethernet adapters to anyone who wanted computers to talk to each other. for two...
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2013-12-31
SOAPnet (2000 - 2013)
soapnet sat in the part of us-cable history that did not reach turkish carriers. disney and abc spun it up in january 2000 to run primetime encores of the abc...
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2013-12-31
Postini (1999 - 2013)
postini was the cloud spam filter that sat in front of fortune-500 mail servers in the 2000s, before "cloud" was the word for it. google bought it in 2007 for...
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2013-12-31
Microsoft Surface Table (2008 - 2013)
the surface table was a 30-inch rear-projection touchscreen built into a coffee-table cabinet, announced by steve ballmer at the all things d conference on 29...
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2013-12-31
Quaero (2005 - 2013)
quaero is latin for i seek, and it was announced in april 2005 by the president of france and the chancellor of germany as the european search engine that...
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2013-12-31
Bitzi (2001 - 2013)
before you downloaded a file off a stranger there was no way to know what was in it. bitzi hashed files and let volunteers write down what each fingerprint...
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2013-12-31
Gawab (1999 - 2013)
gawab was arabic-language webmail run out of alexandria in egypt from 1999, and for most of the 2000s it was the mail service a large part of the...
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2013-12-31
Goozex (2006 - 2013)
goozex never touched a single game it traded. it ran a queue, matched a person who wanted a title with a person who had it, and told one of them to put it in...
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2013-12-31
Wibiya (2008 - 2013)
wibiya made the bar that floated along the bottom edge of a blog, the one with the share buttons on one side and a search box on the other. it was free, it...
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2013-12-31
Ekolay (1999 - 2013)
doğan online built the portal that taught turkish households the word internet, then spent a decade watching facebook take the audience off it. the last day...
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2013-12-31
mp3music (2001 - 2013)
acum, the society that collects for israeli composers and lyricists, had a licensee among the lyrics sites, which in the 2000s was close to unheard of anywhere...
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2013-12-31
Chuang Yi (1990 - 2013)
an australian distributor worked out that the company was gone. madman entertainment posted a notice on 7 february 2014 saying it could no longer resupply...
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2013-12-31
Metaverse Books (2008 - 2013)
eighty minutes is the whole death certificate. a storefront image served fine at 00:34 utc on the last day of 2013 and the same server was throwing 503 by...
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2013-12-27
NowPublic (2005 - 2013)
nowpublic came out of vancouver in 2005 arguing that the people already standing where news happens outnumber the reporters who have to be flown there. it...
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2013-12-27
Vdio (2013 - 2013)
a video store bolted onto a music subscription, built by one of the people who made skype. it opened on 2 april 2013 with twenty five dollars of credit for...
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2013-12-27
Yandex.Otkrytki (2000 - 2013)
27 december 2013, four days before the single busiest greeting night in russia. yandex closed открытки with no announcement and no stated reason, after...
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2013-12-26
Wretch.cc (1999 - 2013)
wretch began in 1999 as a campus bbs at national chiao tung university in hsinchu, run by a computer science undergrad named chien chih-yu. by 2003 it had...
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2013-12-25
Wikifonia (2006 - 2013)
it came out of ghent in 2006, built by a handful of belgian colleges, and it answered the one question every free sheet music site eventually gets asked: who...
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2013-12-20
Winamp (1997 - 2013 (cult era ended), zombie 2014+)
it really whips the llama's ass. winamp was the mp3 player on every windows computer from about 1998 to 2005. nullsoft made it. AOL bought nullsoft in 1999 for...
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2013-12-20
Presseurop (2009 - 2013)
presseurop was an aggregator that translated european press coverage into ten languages, funded by the european commission. it launched on 25 may 2009 as a...
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2013-12-20
Spill.com (2006 - 2013)
spill.com came out of an austin cable-access show and turned film criticism into cartoons. the crew reviewed movies as animated versions of themselves under...
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2013-12-19
Vidalia (2006 - 2013)
for almost eight years the way you knew tor was running was a small onion sitting in your system tray. vidalia was the control panel behind it, written by two...
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2013-12-18
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (2008 - 2013)
mythic spent five years building a realm-versus-realm engine for the warhammer fantasy license and shipped it into a market that had already converged on world...
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2013-12-16
Iceape (2006 - 2013)
moritz muehlenhoff sent the email on 16 december 2013 and it ran to a few lines: security support for iceape had to stop early, users should move to iceweasel...
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2013-12-15
Uboot.com (2000 - 2013)
uboot started as a free sms machine attached to a profile page, which in 2000 was enough to make it one of the fastest growing youth communities in the...
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2013-12-10
Google Trader (2009 - 2013)
kampala got it before anyone else. google trader started in june 2009 inside google sms in uganda, a classifieds market you worked by texting a shortcode,...
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2013-12-10
ClaimID (2006 - 2013)
two phd students at chapel hill built it in 2006 to answer a question that now sounds quaint: what does the web say about you, and which of it did you write....
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2013-12-09
Breakfast Network (2013 - 2013)
bertha henson spent twenty-six years at the straits times and then started her own site, which ran for about eight months before the media development...
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2013-12-06
Evntlive (2013 - 2013)
a live concert platform out of redwood city, open to the public from 15 april 2013, that streamed bon jovi and a run of american festival sets to anybody with...
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2013-12-04
HotFile (2006 - 2013)
the second cyberlocker shoe to drop. ran the megaupload economic model from a panama shell with anton titov operating it from florida. the mpaa stripped its...
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2013-12-04
eBuddy (2003 - 2013)
ebuddy was the dutch web-based instant messenger that let you sign into msn, yahoo, aim, icq, and gtalk from any browser without installing anything. the...
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2013-12-03
Yahoo! Japan Encyclopedia (2008 - 2013)
one hundred and thirty thousand entries out of shogakukan's nipponica went online for nothing on 27 november 2008 and came back off on 3 december 2013. yahoo!...
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2013-12-03
Narenji (2007 - 2013)
the irgc's sarollah headquarters took fourteen people out of a small office in kerman on 3 december 2013. they reviewed phones for a living. eleven of them...
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2013-12-02
Hyves (2004 - 2013)
hyves was the social network of the netherlands. founded in october 2004 by three dutch students, it grew through the late 2000s until more than 10 million...
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2013-12-02
Turntable.fm (2011 - 2013)
turntable.fm launched in may 2011 from new york with a single great idea. you walked into a virtual room and sat at one of five dj booths. you played a song...
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2013-12-02
OCZ Technology (2002 - 2013)
ryan petersen ran an overclocking store and turned it into a memory brand in august 2002, back when the ram in your machine was a thing you argued about on a...
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2013-12-01
Memepool (1998 - 2013)
memepool was the multiple-author link weblog joshua schachter started in 1998 with jeff smith. the format was one short post per item, with a link out to...
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2013-12-01
Where I've Been (2007 - 2013)
a facebook application that turned your travel history into a colored-in world map, written by one freelance developer in 2007 and large enough within months...
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2013-12-01
Sheep Marketplace (2013 - 2013)
sheep opened in march 2013 as one of dozens of small tor markets and became one of the largest by accident, when the fbi took silk road off the network in...
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2013-12-01
ClanBase (1998 - 2013)
clanbase started in october 1998 as a dutch ladder where quake ii clans arranged wars against each other, and it grew into the place european competitive pc...
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2013-12-01
TheWB.com (2008 - 2013)
a television network that had already stopped broadcasting came back in 2008 as a website. warner bros put the old wb catalog online, gilmore girls and buffy...
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2013-12-01
Terminal Reality (1994 - 2013)
the news came off a facebook post. in december 2013 a man who had worked at terminal reality for ten years wrote that the place seemed to have finally shut...
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2013-12-01
GeoURL (2002 - 2013)
a meta tag with two numbers in it was the whole protocol. geourl read the coordinates off your page and told you which other pages sat near it, which in 2002...
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2013-12-01
HipGeo (2011 - 2013)
the founders had sold a company to yahoo in 1999 and watched it get folded into geocities, so they knew exactly what happens to a place people keep their...
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2013-11-30
Food Force (2005 - 2013)
the united nations shipped a video game. the world food programme paid for food force, released it free on 14 april 2005, and six million people downloaded it...
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2013-11-30
Daily Source Code (2004 - 2013)
on 13 august 2004 adam curry published an audio file mainly so that developers writing download software had something to point their code at. it ran 867...
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2013-11-30
Wikimapy.cz (2006 - 2013)
seznam.cz opened a mediawiki in june 2006 and asked czech walkers to write the descriptions of the castles and the ponds themselves, then shipped what they...
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2013-11-23
LightScribe (2004 - 2013)
hewlett-packard showed lightscribe at ces in january 2004 and the demo did exactly what the name promised. you burned your data and then put the disc back in...
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2013-11-22
Joli OS (2008 - 2013)
joli os was a cloud-centric linux distribution built for the asus eee pc era of netbooks. tariq krim, of netvibes, founded jolicloud alongside romain huet in...
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2013-11-20
Google Currents (2011 - 2013)
google currents was the news reader google tried before it tried google play newsstand, which it tried before it tried google news app, which it tried before...
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2013-11-20
Google Checkout (2006 - 2013)
google's attempt to own the checkout button the way paypal already did. it launched in 2006 with cheap processing and the whole search empire behind it, and...
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2013-11-18
OpenLife Grid (2007 - 2013)
fifty thousand accounts were created on a virtual world run by one australian out of a company called 3dx, and for a couple of years around 2008 that made...
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2013-11-18
gdgt (2009 - 2013)
peter rojas started gizmodo, then started engadget, then left to build the thing neither of them had: a structured page for every gadget, with buttons for the...
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2013-11-12
paidContent (2002 - 2013)
rafat ali started paidcontent in 2002 as a blog about who was actually making money from digital content, at a moment when the honest answer was almost nobody....
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2013-11-12
YouTube Original Channel Initiative (2011 - 2013)
one hundred million dollars in production money and two hundred million more in marketing bought google about 160 funded channels, madonna and jay-z among the...
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2013-11-11
Bread (2011 - 2013)
yahoo announced it had bought bread on 11 october 2013 and the links were given thirty days. the product was a url shortener with a tollbooth in it: click a...
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2013-11-06
YouTube comments (the original era) (2005 - 2013)
the comment section of youtube before google forced it through google+ in 2013. it was famously bad. flame wars. spam. the worst possible takes about any...
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2013-11-06
Rocketboom (2004 - 2013)
rocketboom was the daily video newscast produced by andrew baron in new york city between october 2004 and november 2013. amanda congdon hosted the first two...
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2013-11-06
Jumptap (2005 - 2013)
jumptap.com answers 404 today, and the error page it serves is titled Yahoo. that single fact contains the whole corporate lineage: millennial media bought...
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2013-11-05
Everpix (2011 - 2013)
everpix was a photo backup service that vacuumed up every image from your phone and your social feeds, deduped them, and showed you a clean scrollable timeline...
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2013-11-05
Albumatic (2013 - 2013)
adam ludwin was a venture investor at rre who had put the firm into vine, and in february 2013 he left to build a photo app in the most crowded category the...
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2013-11-04
Wapedia (2004 - 2013)
florian amrhein put wikipedia on a wap phone in august 2004, years before the wikimedia foundation got around to it, at an address that ended in .mobi back...
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2013-11-02
Twitscoop (2008 - 2013)
philippe breuils shipped this in may 2008, and a year later half a million people were watching a tag cloud that grew a word only when that word started...
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2013-11-01
iGoogle (2005 - 2013)
igoogle was google's customizable home page. you opened a tab and a grid of widgets you had picked yourself was sitting there. weather next to your gmail...
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2013-11-01
Dopplr (2007 - 2013)
a london travel-plans social network for the tech-press conference circuit. nokia bought it in 2009, stopped updating the blog two days later, and finally...
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2013-11-01
Raditaz (2011 - 2013)
raditaz was one of the many pandora-style radio services that bloomed in the early 2010s, a free app that built stations from tags and let you pin them. in...
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2013-11-01
Black Market Reloaded (2011 - 2013)
the market that inherited silk road's traffic and decided it could not carry it. black market reloaded ran on tor from 2011 and allowed what silk road refused,...
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2013-11-01
Smolt (2007 - 2013)
fedora's hardware census. it shipped with fedora 7 in may 2007 and asked, politely and once, whether you wanted to send an anonymous list of what was inside...
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2013-11-01
Online Pass (2010 - 2013)
ten dollars, printed on a slip of cardboard inside the game case, was the price of making a used disc worth less. buy the game new and the code came free with...
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2013-11-01
Full Screen Mario (2013 - 2013)
one month after boing boing linked to it, fullscreenmario.com was serving about three hundred thousand visits a day and josh goldberg was a junior at...
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2013-11-01
Kindernet (1988 - 2013)
a finnish producer who thought children's cartoons had turned too violent put kindernet on a satellite on 1 march 1988, beaming into the netherlands from...
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2013-10-31
BattleForge (2009 - 2013)
battleforge was an electronic arts real time strategy game where your army was a deck of cards you bought and traded on an in-game auction house, then played...
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2013-10-31
Dragon Ball Online (2010 - 2013)
dragon ball online was a korean mmo set 216 years after the end of dragon ball z, with a timeline and a cast of new villains that akira toriyama designed...
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2013-10-31
Swapnote (2011 - 2013)
swapnote shipped free on the 3ds eshop in december 2011 and let you write a note by hand with a photo or a sound attached, then send it to a friend online or...
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2013-10-31
NexTView (1995 - 2013)
october 2013 is when the last transmitter stopped, and by then there was only one left. nextview was a program guide that european television manufacturers...
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2013-10-30
Qype (2006 - 2013)
a german answer to yelp, built city by city because that is the only way a review site gets built. hamburg first, then everywhere in western europe that would...
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2013-10-30
Sky Text (1985 - 2013)
on 23 october 2012 ceefax ended and every obituary in britain treated that as the death of teletext. sky text kept broadcasting for another year and a week...
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2013-10-26
FriendBinder (2007 - 2013)
the goodbye went up on the project blog at 23:22 on 9 october 2013, three years after the previous post. richard cunningham gave his users seventeen days....
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2013-10-25
Amazon AskVille (2006 - 2013)
askville was amazon's user driven question and answer community that ran from december 2006 to october 2013. members earned experience points and a virtual...
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2013-10-21
isoHunt (2003 - 2013)
isoHunt was a canadian torrent index that ran for ten years on the argument that it was just a search engine. the MPAA disagreed and the los angeles federal...
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2013-10-21
CryptoSeal (2011 - 2014)
the court documents in the lavabit case became public in october 2013, and ryan lackey read them and closed his own product two weeks later. cryptoseal privacy...
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2013-10-17
Lakome.com (2010 - 2013)
two editors who had already been shut down in print started an independent news site in december 2010, one running it in arabic and the other in french. inside...
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2013-10-17
Windows SideShow (2007 - 2013)
january 2007, and microsoft ships an api for a class of hardware that did not exist yet and largely never came to exist. sideshow pushed mail and rss to a...
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2013-10-17
2K Marin (2007 - 2013)
take-two has still never said this studio closed. 2K announced it on 17 december 2007, built it in novato specifically to make bioshock 2 without ken levine,...
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2013-10-15
AmpliFIND (2006 - 2013)
twenty-two million audio fingerprints sat in a database that could name a tagless mp3 by listening to it. musicdns did that from 2006, first under musicip and...
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2013-10-07
Shadow Cities (2010 - 2013)
grey area launched shadow cities in finland on 10 november 2010, an iphone game that drew a map of wherever you were standing and cut it into gateways for two...
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2013-10-02
Silk Road (2011 - 2013)
the first anonymous market at real scale. it proved that tor and bitcoin could move actual money for actual contraband, and it proved the fbi would find you...
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2013-10-01
Worth1000 (2002 - 2013)
worth1000 was the early-2000s english-language photoshop scene given a competitive structure. for almost twelve years avi muchnick and israel derdik ran themed...
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2013-10-01
Cue (2010 - 2013)
personal search that turned into a personal assistant and then into an acquisition. it opened in 2010 as greplin, one search box over the accounts you had...
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2013-10-01
FlashPix (1996 - 2013)
kodak, microsoft, hewlett-packard and a small california company called live picture agreed on an image format in 1996. the file held your picture at full...
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2013-10-01
Nirvanix (2007 - 2013)
a letter dated 16 september 2013 gave nirvanix customers until the end of that month to get their data out. some of them were storing petabytes. the company...
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2013-09-30
WebTV / MSN TV (1996 - 2013)
the set-top box that connected a normal TV to the internet via a phone line and a hand-held remote keyboard. launched as webtv in 1996. bought by microsoft in...
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2013-09-30
Facebook Credits (2009 - 2013)
facebook spent four years pretending its own coupon would beat the dollar. ten credits per dollar, facebook took thirty percent, zynga took the rest. by 2013...
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2013-09-30
FileMaker Bento (2008 - 2013)
bento was the consumer face of filemaker. forty-nine dollars for a single license, ninety-nine for a five-pack, mac only at launch with an iphone and ipad...
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2013-09-30
OMGPop (2006 - 2013)
a small new york flash game studio that hit escape velocity with draw something in early 2012. zynga paid one hundred and eighty million dollars for it in...
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2013-09-30
MediaCorp Teletext (1983 - 2013)
certificate of entitlement prices and the 4d lottery draw are what a singaporean actually typed a page number for, and from 1 august 1983 those pages were the...
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2013-09-30
Avid DS (1998 - 2013)
ten thousand dollars of software, and the only way to conform an avid project at 2k or 4k. built in montreal by softimage while microsoft still owned the...
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2013-09-21
Cookie Jar TV (2006 - 2013)
on 21 september 2013 cbs aired a saturday morning cartoon block for the last time. it had carried three different names in seven years, and every one of them...
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2013-09-20
Urtak (2008 - 2013)
a polling widget that publishers dropped underneath their articles, built in new york by aaron gibralter and marc lizoain. every question took one of three...
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2013-09-19
Pirates of the Caribbean Online (2007 - 2013)
the disney mmo built around the pirates of the caribbean films. it launched on halloween 2007 with character creation and ship combat, set in a caribbean...
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2013-09-19
Pixie Hollow (2008 - 2013)
the disney fairies mmo built as a tie-in to the tinker bell film franchise. you created a fairy with a talent type and dressed her in seasonal clothing, played...
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2013-09-19
Toontown Online (2003 - 2013)
the disney mmo where you played a small cartoon dog or cat or rabbit fighting off business-suit robots called cogs. it launched in 2003. disney shut it down on...
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2013-09-16
Tencent Soso (2006 - 2013)
tencent had qq, the dominant chinese instant messenger of the era, and it wanted a search engine to match. so it built soso in 2006 and bolted the search box...
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2013-09-16
Soso (2006 - 2013)
tencent owned the messenger that nearly every person online in china had open, and it pointed that audience at its own search engine for seven years. soso got...
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2013-09-12
Chime.in (2011 - 2013)
chime.in was bill gross trying to organize a social network around subjects rather than friends. ubermedia opened the public beta on 18 october 2011 with posts...
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2013-09-10
Apple Cards (2011 - 2013)
apple shipped the cards app on october 12, 2011 alongside the iphone 4s and ios 5. it let you build a physical greeting card from any photo on your phone, type...
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2013-09-09
QtWeb (2008 - 2013)
one executable, no installer, nothing written into the machine you borrowed. qtweb was a webkit browser built for people using computers they did not own, and...
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2013-09-08
Tutorspree (2011 - 2013)
eighty percent of tutorspree's traffic went away in march 2013, inside a single google panda update, and virtually all of its customers had been arriving from...
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2013-09-05
Microsoft Mediaroom (2007 - 2013)
mediaroom was the layer of microsoft you only met if your phone company sold you tv. att u-verse, telus optik, bell fibe, deutsche telekom entertain. powered...
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2013-09-02
Blip.pl (2007 - 2013)
blip was the polish microblog, started in warsaw in may 2007 and sold to gadu-gadu a month later. what carried it was not the character limit, it was the...
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2013-09-01
AlphaSmart (1993 - 2013)
alphasmart made a keyboard with a narrow lcd strip above it and nothing else. no browser and no notifications. american schools bought them by the cartload...
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2013-09-01
Yahoo China (1999 - 2013)
yahoo opened its chinese portal in 1999, bought the toolbar company 3721 for $120 million in 2003, and by 2005 had given up on running the place itself. it...
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2013-09-01
Atlantis (2013 - 2013)
atlantis opened in march 2013 and spent six months doing the one thing nobody else in this category attempted, which was advertising. it put a cartoon...
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2013-09-01
The Plant List (2010 - 2013)
kew and the missouri botanical garden merged their checklists and published one working list of every plant species anybody had ever named, because 193...
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2013-09-01
Mobcaster (2011 - 2013)
aubrey levy was an actor and writer who watched a pilot of his own go through round after round of network notes and then never air. mobcaster was his answer:...
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2013-08-31
RockMelt (2010 - 2013)
rockmelt opened in november 2010 from tim howes and eric vishria with marc andreessen's name on the cap table and the same pitch flock had been making since...
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2013-08-31
Microsoft TechNet Subscription (1998 - 2013)
it started as a stack of discs in the post carrying the whole microsoft knowledge base, and became the cheapest legal way for an it professional to get hold of...
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2013-08-31
The Oil Drum (2005 - 2013)
two professors started an energy blog in 2005 and accidentally built the last comment section that was better than the articles above it. during the deepwater...
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2013-08-31
Pando (2006 - 2013)
one gigabyte was the number pando sold. in 2006 that was an impossible email attachment, and pando's answer was to send a tiny descriptor file instead and move...
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2013-08-31
WeSeed (2007 - 2013)
autumn 2008 was a strange season to launch a website that made the stock market look approachable. weseed handed you fake money and a search engine that turned...
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2013-08-31
Team AlexandriZ (2009 - 2013)
a scanner, a proofreading pass and a numbering scheme kept french publishing awake for four years. team alexandriz took printed novels apart, stripped drm off...
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2013-08-30
Catch Notes (2008 - 2013)
catch notes was the android note-taking app that briefly looked like it could pressure evernote. four million users at peak, $9.3 million in funding from excel...
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2013-08-30
Xbox Live Arcade (2004 - 2013)
a 50 MB size limit is what made it work. developers who could not fit a retail game into that had to make something else instead, and what they made was braid...
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2013-08-30
Daum Yozm (2010 - 2013)
twitter reached korea first and never let go of it. daum's answer opened in february 2010 with a 150 character ceiling and social games bolted onto the side,...
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2013-08-29
FusionFall (2009 - 2013)
for four and a half years cartoon network ran a real mmo with player housing and a subscription card you bought at target. the kids who played it were nine....
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2013-08-26
Microsoft Points (2005 - 2013)
the virtual currency for xbox live and zune that almost nobody could convert in their head. 80 points to the dollar was the joke, except 79 also showed up next...
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2013-08-21
Orbit Downloader (2006 - 2013)
eset published the finding on 21 august 2013: one of the most downloaded free download managers for windows had been fetching a target list from its own...
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2013-08-20
Current TV (2005 - 2013)
current tv was an american cable channel that lived in the us cable bundle for eight years and never broadcast outside the united states. it started in august...
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2013-08-20
Groklaw (2003 - 2013)
groklaw was one paralegal and her readership doing the work the technology press could not be bothered with, which was reading every filing in sco against ibm...
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2013-08-18
GoMusicNow (2007 - 2013)
nine cents bought a song and nineteen cents bought a better copy of it, but the wallet you loaded to pay with needed twenty dollars in it before the site would...
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2013-08-16
Fleck (2011 - 2013)
oakland, california, where a studio best known for a mobile casino game built a massively multiplayer world on top of google maps. fleck let you garden on real...
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2013-08-13
0x10c (2012 - 2013)
markus persson announced it on 3 april 2012, four months after stepping back from minecraft, and the piece people actually built things with was a fictional...
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2013-08-09
Google Latitude (2009 - 2013)
google latitude was google maps' location-sharing layer from 2009 to 2013. you opted in, and your friends saw a small dot on the map wherever you were. that...
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2013-08-09
Silent Mail (2012 - 2013)
jon callas wrote the notice himself and the striking line in it was that nothing had happened yet. no subpoena and no warrant from anybody. lavabit had folded...
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2013-08-08
Lavabit (2004 - 2013)
lavabit was a small encrypted email service that ended up with one very famous customer, edward snowden. in 2013 the federal government demanded the private...
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2013-08-08
Flud (2010 - 2013)
at the end of 2010 flud was adding a user every four seconds and fast company had just called its ipad layout the best interface design of the year. three...
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2013-08-05
Astrid (2008 - 2013)
astrid was an open-source todo app started in 2008. it built a cult on android with a green octopus mascot and a clean priority model. yahoo acquired the team...
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2013-08-04
Freedom Hosting (2008 - 2013)
the fbi took the servers in the first days of august 2013 and then left them switched on, which is the part that changed things. anyone loading a page on the...
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2013-08-04
Tor Mail (2010 - 2013)
one raid took it out and the raid was not even aimed at the mail. tor mail had run since about 2010 as a hidden service on freedom hosting, promising that no...
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2013-08-02
X10 Wireless Technology (1999 - 2013)
28.6 million people arrived at x10.com in may 2001, which put it fifth on the web behind aol and microsoft, and hardly any of them meant to go there. the...
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2013-08-01
PC World (print) (1983 - 2013)
idg's flagship consumer-pc print magazine. first issue march 1983 by david bunnell and cheryl woodard, the same pair behind macworld a year later. first...
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2013-08-01
Puretracks (2003 - 2013)
puretracks was canada's answer to the itunes store, launched in october 2003 out of a company called moontaxi that had been piping streaming music into shops...
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2013-08-01
PubSub (2002 - 2013)
bob wyman and salim ismail built it in 2002 around an idea they called prospective search. an ordinary engine holds documents and runs your query against them...
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2013-08-01
Mister Wong (2006 - 2013)
mister wong was germany's answer to delicious and for a few years it beat delicious inside germany, which almost nothing did in any category. it ran out of...
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2013-08-01
Indiaplaza (1999 - 2013)
fabmart opened in bangalore in june 1999 and was the first real online store in india, which meant it had to build the payment method and the delivery...
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2013-08-01
Yozm (2010 - 2013)
yozm was daum's microblog, launched in february 2010 with a 150-character box and some social gaming bolted onto it. it reached around three million users in...
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2013-08-01
Windows Live Home (2007 - 2013)
outlook.com killed it by not having a front door. windows live home was the dashboard microsoft put at home.live.com in october 2007 to hold hotmail and...
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2013-07-31
Xtranormal (2008 - 2013)
xtranormal handed anyone a movie studio with a two-line learning curve. you typed dialogue and picked two characters at a desk, and it read the words back in a...
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2013-07-31
Soocial (2007 - 2013)
viadeo bought the amsterdam startup soocial in november 2011 for its contact syncing and turned the syncing off on 31 july 2013. roughly 120,000 people had...
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2013-07-27
Stick Figure Death Theatre (1996 - 2013)
breaking the rules of entertainment was the slogan, and the rule being broken was that a cartoon needs characters you can tell apart. matt calvert started...
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2013-07-26
Voxeo (1999 - 2013)
aspect software closed its purchase on 26 july 2013 and a fourteen year old telephony company went inside somebody else's product catalog. voxeo's whole...
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2013-07-25
Yahoo! Stars India (2012 - 2013)
25 july 2013 was a bad day to be a small yahoo product. twelve of them were switched off at once and the headline went to altavista, which is how a celebrity...
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2013-07-24
PerfSpot (2006 - 2013)
in august 2007 nielsen made a phoenix startup the fastest growing social network in britain, up 756 percent in four months, running past facebook's own curve....
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2013-07-24
Snapjoy (2011 - 2013)
six months after dropbox acquired the team, a post went up on the snapjoy blog saying imports were off as of that morning and every photo would be deleted on...
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2013-07-18
Ravenwood Fair (2010 - 2013)
john romero arrived at lolapps on 1 august 2010 and shipped ravenwood fair on facebook eleven weeks later. six months after that it had twenty five million...
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2013-07-17
Bebo (2005 - 2014)
the social network that owned UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and a few other english-speaking markets from 2005 to 2010. AOL bought it in 2008 for 850 million...
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2013-07-15
Xanga (1998 - 2013)
the US blog platform that was huge in american high schools from 2002 to 2007. eprops, subscriptions to your friends' blogs, weekly themes, questrings. it ran...
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2013-07-15
Personal Ancestral File (1984 - 2013)
paf was written by the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints because the church wanted families entered into a database and the people doing the entering...
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2013-07-12
Identi.ca (2008 - 2013)
identi.ca was the canadian developer evan prodromou's flagship instance of statusnet, the open-source microblogging server software he originally called...
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2013-07-08
AltaVista (1995 - 2013)
the first search engine that actually returned useful results. DEC built it to demo their alpha cpus. it was the default search engine of the late 1990s for...
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2013-07-08
Yahoo! Neighbors (2007 - 2013)
sacramento and san carlos got it first, in november 2007, out of a hack day project by a product manager on the yahoo local team. the idea was a discussion...
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2013-07-06
Winny (2002 - 2013)
isamu kaneko posted the first build of winny to a 2channel board in may 2002 under the handle 47, and the kyoto police arrested him two years later for the...
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2013-07-04
OmniGraphSketcher (2009 - 2013)
robin stewart started it at williams college in 2003, turned it into an mit master's thesis, and sold both the app and himself to the omni group in 2008. the...
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2013-07-01
Google Reader (2005 - 2013)
the RSS reader. you subscribed to feeds from blogs, news sites, friends' personal pages. the reader checked everything in the background. you opened it once a...
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2013-07-01
FoxyTunes (2004 - 2013)
foxytunes was a tiny strip on the firefox toolbar that controlled whatever music player you had open behind it. play, pause, next, song title. it worked with...
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2013-07-01
DivShare (2005 - 2013)
a file host from the years when the web still needed one, built for podcasters and teachers who wanted to embed audio and video without running a server. it...
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2013-07-01
SightSpeed (2001 - 2013)
sightspeed made video calls that looked better than everyone else's when video calls still stuttered and froze, which in the early 2000s was most of the time....
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2013-07-01
1-800-FREE-411 (2005 - 2013)
in october 2006 the chief executive said out loud that the company lost about five cents on every call it answered, and then raised thirty million dollars from...
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2013-07-01
ThinkQuest (1996 - 2013)
allan h. weis built a web-design contest for schoolchildren in 1996 and paid for it out of the nonprofit he had left over from selling a piece of the early...
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2013-07-01
BO.LT (2011 - 2013)
five million dollars from benchmark capital paid for a button that copied any page on the web, let you rewrite it and handed you a short link to the result....
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2013-06-30
Nextel iDEN Network (1994 - 2013)
nextel was the us push-to-talk carrier built on motorola's iden protocol. its defining sound was the chirp: a half-second beep that meant the person on the...
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2013-06-30
PublicPost (2011 - 2013)
publicpost.ru launched on 28 november 2011 as a russian answer to the huffington post, half blog platform and half political reporting. the money came from the...
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2013-06-30
Clipboard (2012 - 2013)
gary flake had run microsoft live labs and yahoo research before he started clipboard in january 2011, and his pitch was that saving things would be the fourth...
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2013-06-28
Songbird (2006 - 2013)
songbird was the open-source music player that wanted to be firefox for music. mozilla xulrunner underneath with an extension marketplace on top. it shipped...
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2013-06-28
Yahoo Axis (2012 - 2013)
axis was yahoo's browser experiment, launched may 23 2012 as an extension for chrome, firefox, internet explorer and safari with companion ios apps for iphone...
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2013-06-28
WiiConnect24 (2006 - 2013)
wiiconnect24 was nintendo's always-on backbone for the wii. it kept the console phoning home in standby, drawing about 9.6 watts instead of 1.3, so animal...
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2013-06-28
Everybody Votes Channel (2007 - 2013)
nintendo shipped a free channel in 2007 whose entire content was a question with two answers. you voted with your mii, and a few days later the console showed...
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2013-06-28
Check Mii Out Channel (2007 - 2013)
nintendo shipped a free wii channel whose entire purpose was showing off the little avatars people had made of themselves. you submitted a mii and it came back...
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2013-06-21
Acetrax (2006 - 2013)
a zürich company that sold films over the internet to televisions, back when a television could barely manage it, by getting its software installed at the...
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2013-06-19
Falcon Pro (2012 - 2013)
falcon pro was an android twitter client written by joaquim verges, released to the play store in december 2012 and finished six and a half months later....
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2013-06-19
DotAlicious (2010 - 2013)
dota 2 had not left beta when it emptied the warcraft iii ladders, and dotalicious was one of them. it opened in april 2010 on rented german servers. players...
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2013-06-18
Pet Society (2008 - 2013)
pet society was the playfish facebook game where you raised a cartoon pet, washed it in a bathtub, dressed it from a clothes shop and visited your friends'...
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2013-06-17
Empires & Allies (2011 - 2013)
zynga's biggest launch ever, for about a month. empires and allies put a combat layer on top of the farmville formula, went out in twelve languages on 1 june...
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2013-06-14
The Sims Social (2011 - 2013)
the sims social was ea's facebook adaptation of the sims franchise, built by playfish and released on 9 august 2011. it took sixty-five million registered...
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2013-06-14
Playfish (2007 - 2013)
playfish was the london social-game studio kristian segerstrale and three co-founders started in october 2007, one month after facebook opened its platform to...
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2013-06-14
SimCity Social (2012 - 2013)
a licensed sequel that inherited a franchise name it could not carry. simcity social was a facebook city-builder built by playfish under the ea logo, killed...
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2013-06-12
Newsmill (2008 - 2013)
for 50,000 kronor a week you could buy guaranteed placement on newsmill, which explains more about the site than its launch copy ever did. bonnier opened it in...
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2013-06-04
Google Building Maker (2009 - 2013)
google building maker let anyone pick a building in one of at least 127 cities and push simple boxes around against aerial photographs until the geometry...
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2013-06-02
BBM Music (2011 - 2013)
fifty songs. that was the library you got for $4.99 a month, and the only way to make it bigger was to recruit your blackberry messenger contacts onto the same...
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2013-06-01
Google Base (2005 - 2013)
google base was google's attempt to run a general-purpose structured-data database in 2005, where anyone could upload xml or excel or csv about anything (a...
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2013-06-01
Vote for the Worst (2004 - 2013)
most sites that hated a television show reviewed it. this one tried to break it. vote for the worst picked the weakest contestant on american idol every week...
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2013-06-01
The Adrenaline Vault (1995 - 2013)
an investment banker who thought the print game magazines had gone soft started a website in 1995 to run reviews nobody had paid for. by 2000 avault was...
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2013-06-01
LendInk (2011 - 2013)
amazon let a kindle owner lend a book once, for fourteen days, if the author had chosen the royalty rate that allowed it. dale porter built a site where...
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2013-06-01
ABC Pool (2008 - 2013)
abc pool opened as a public beta in august 2008 inside abc radio national, and asked australians to upload their own audio and photographs under creative...
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2013-06-01
Webosaurs (2009 - 2013)
reel fx made animation for shrek and kung fu panda and open season, and in 2009 it built itself a virtual world for five to ten year olds where everyone was a...
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2013-06-01
Yahoo Mail Classic (1997 - 2013)
marissa mayer's redesign shipped in december 2012 and six months later the old interface was switched off for everyone still on it. leaving classic behind...
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2013-06-01
Adobe Visual Communicator (2003 - 2013)
american middle schools ran morning news bulletins, and for about ten years a lot of them ran on this. serious magic replaced the video timeline with a...
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2013-06-01
Another.com (2000 - 2013)
6,596 domain names in may 2000, more than 12,000 by the autumn of 2001, and every single one of them a .co.uk. another.com sold the idea that your email...
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2013-05-30
Camino (2002 - 2013)
camino started in february 2002 as chimera, a side project from dave hyatt and mike pinkerton who thought mac users deserved a cocoa-native browser rather than...
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2013-05-30
JManga (2011 - 2013)
thirty-six japanese publishers agreed to put manga online legally in english, which had never happened before and has not happened in that form since. the...
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2013-05-29
Civilization World (2011 - 2013)
firaxis put civilization on facebook and removed the one thing that made civilization civilization, which was the turn. it ran in real time in a browser, with...
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2013-05-26
Better Place (2007 - 2013)
better place was shai agassi's plan to fix electric vehicles by separating the battery from the car. battery swap stations would let drivers exchange a...
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2013-05-25
Quintura (2005 - 2013)
a moscow development team with a holding company in virginia built a search engine that drew you a cloud of related words and let you steer it by hovering over...
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2013-05-24
Liberty Reserve (2006 - 2013)
a costa rica shell company that ran a currency. you signed up with a name and an email. you bought "lr dollars" and sent them to anyone. the us treasury called...
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2013-05-24
BBC Digital Media Initiative (2008 - 2013)
the bbc used it to make one television show. the digital media initiative was supposed to take videotape out of the entire corporation, started in february...
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2013-05-21
Battlefield Online (2010 - 2013)
electronic arts and dice let neowiz rebuild battlefield 2 as a free korean pc bang game and then released it in exactly one country. it launched on 30 march...
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2013-05-18
HijackThis (2002 - 2013)
a dutch student wrote a scanner with no opinion about anything. it read the parts of windows that a hijacker had to touch and printed them as a flat list,...
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2013-05-13
Lucky Sort (2011 - 2013)
13 may 2013, 19:21 utc: lucky sort replaced its own homepage with a letter saying it had been bought by twitter, and that was the last afternoon anyone could...
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2013-05-12
MiniMonos (2009 - 2013)
melissa clark-reynolds built minimonos in new zealand from 2009, an island where children six and over made a monkey and played mini games about recycling...
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2013-05-10
Google SMS Search (2004 - 2013)
people without data plans were the last real constituency for google sms search, and on friday 10 may 2013 google switched it off without telling them. you...
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2013-05-07
Adobe Fireworks (1998 - 2013)
fireworks was the macromedia tool web designers reached for when photoshop felt like a tank and illustrator overshot. it shipped from 1998 through 2012 and...
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2013-05-02
Hotmail (1996 - 2013)
the first webmail that worked. you got an @hotmail.com address, you logged in from any computer in the world, and your email was there. microsoft bought it in...
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2013-05-01
Webmonkey (1996 - 2013)
webmonkey was hotwired's spinoff web-dev tutorial site. it launched in august 1996 with javascript and html guides for the people who were teaching themselves...
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2013-05-01
We7 (2007 - 2013)
we7 launched in april 2007 as a uk music download service co-founded by peter gabriel and steve purdham of surfcontrol. the model was an audio ad spliced into...
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2013-05-01
Summly (2011 - 2013)
a london teenager built a mobile news summarizer with yoko ono and ashton kutcher on the cap table. he then sold the whole thing to yahoo for around thirty...
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2013-05-01
HTC First (2013 - 2013)
the htc first was the phone built to launch facebook home, the skin that turned your whole android screen into a facebook feed. it lasted about a month. at&t...
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2013-05-01
Star Wars Kid (2003 - 2013)
a fourteen year old in trois-rivieres filmed himself in a school studio in november 2002 and left the tape behind. classmates found it, made a file of it and...
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2013-05-01
Weplay (2008 - 2013)
weplay was a social network for youth sports, launched in march 2008 by a joint venture of creative artists agency and mlb advanced media with a hedge fund's...
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2013-05-01
Kanoodle (1999 - 2013)
in october 2004, when every site owner on the web was arguing about how much google was keeping, kanoodle shipped brightads and asked publishers to consider a...
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2013-05-01
Unsanity (2000 - 2013)
haxie was a word this company invented, out of hack mac os x, for the small system modifications apple had permitted in mac os 9 and left no room for...
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2013-05-01
Storylane (2012 - 2013)
seven months after it opened to the public, facebook bought storylane's five people and explicitly did not buy storylane. the stories stayed with whoever wrote...
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2013-04-30
Posterous (2008 - 2013)
posterous launched in 2008 as a way to post anything to a blog by sending it as an email. founders sachin agarwal and garry tan ran it through y combinator. by...
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2013-04-30
Sony Tablet S / Tablet P (2011 - 2013)
the sony tablet line was a two-device run. the tablet s was a 9.4 inch wedge that landed september 16, 2011, and the tablet p was a dual-screen folding...
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2013-04-30
Yahooligans! (1996 - 2013)
yahooligans was yahoo's kid-safe directory, launched in april 1996 as a hand-curated guide to the open web for children aged about four to fourteen. for a...
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2013-04-30
EA Black Box (1998 - 2013)
ea black box was an EA-owned game studio in burnaby, canada that defined the import-tuner era of need for speed from 2003 through 2008. it also built the skate...
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2013-04-30
Upcoming.org (2003 - 2013)
upcoming was andy baio's social events calendar from october 2003. you posted an event with a date and a location, your friends could mark themselves as...
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2013-04-30
Norton Ghost (1995 - 2013)
the disk imaging tool. murray haszard built ghost at binary research in auckland new zealand in 1995. symantec acquired the company in 1998 and folded it into...
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2013-04-30
schülerVZ (2007 - 2013)
schülerVZ was the under-18 social network for the german-speaking world, launched in february 2007 as a sister site to studiVZ. holtzbrinck had bought the...
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2013-04-30
Wavii (2008 - 2013)
wavii used natural language processing to summarize the news into short structured updates you could follow by topic. seattle-founded, in stealth for four...
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2013-04-30
Streetfiles (2008 - 2013)
a 44,000 euro debt left over from an earlier version of the same project is what closed streetfiles. three berlin developers took the graffiti archive over in...
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2013-04-30
Kingdom Hearts Mobile (2008 - 2013)
for four and a half years square enix kept a small 2d world running on japanese feature phones, where you walked a kingdom hearts avatar between a point bank...
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2013-04-28
WWE All Stars (2011 - 2013)
aubrey sitterson, an interactive marketing manager at wwe games, confirmed on twitter that the servers were off. that was the announcement. thq had published...
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2013-04-28
Fuduntu (2010 - 2013)
andrew wyatt ended his own distribution on 28 april 2013 and put the arithmetic in the announcement: fewer than 2,500 people were still running it, and the...
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2013-04-26
Spinner.com (1996 - 2013)
spinner started as thedj.com in 1996 in san francisco. one of the very first internet radio services, claimed to be the largest by 2001. aol bought it in june...
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2013-04-26
AOL Sessions (2003 - 2013)
aol sessions was an in-house concert series from aol music that filmed acoustic and stripped-down performances by major recording artists for the aol music...
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2013-04-25
Yandex Narod (2000 - 2013)
three million russian home pages needed a new landlord in 2013, and yandex found one rather than keep paying for them. narod.ru opened in 2000 as free hosting...
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2013-04-22
r/FindBostonBombers (2013 - 2013)
opened on 16 april 2013, the day after the boston marathon bombing, by people who thought a few thousand readers looking at the same crowd photographs would...
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2013-04-21
Máquina de Quadrinhos (2009 - 2013)
mauricio de sousa produções opened the máquina de quadrinhos on 11 september 2009, a browser toy that assembled a turma da mônica strip out of ready-made...
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2013-04-15
Formspring (2009 - 2013)
formspring was the anonymous question box of the early 2010s. you posted a profile, anyone could ask you anything without showing their name, and the answer...
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2013-04-15
Rambler Maps (2000 - 2013)
on 10 october 2000 rambler put a map of russia on the web, the first one a russian portal had. over the next twelve years it learned to build routes across the...
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2013-04-11
We Are Hunted (2009 - 2013)
we are hunted was a music-discovery chart that turned blog buzz into a real-time top-list of songs nobody had heard yet. it ran for four years before twitter...
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2013-04-09
Tumblr Storyboard (2012 - 2013)
chris mohney came over from gawker to run an editorial desk inside a blogging platform, and jessica bennett came from newsweek and the daily beast to write for...
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2013-04-08
Windows Live Messenger (2005 - 2013)
the new name for msn messenger after december 2005. same green icon, same contact list, longer string in the install wizard. peak of 330 million monthly users...
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2013-04-08
Messenger Plus! (2001 - 2013)
cyril paciullo wrote an add-on for msn messenger in 2001 and 62 million people ended up installing it. it added colored nicknames and sound clips to a program...
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2013-04-04
Handmark (2000 - 2013)
kansas city, about twenty miles north of sprint's headquarters in overland park, which turns out to be the whole ending. handmark spent thirteen years selling...
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2013-04-04
Is Anybody Down? (2011 - 2013)
the federal trade commission is not usually who ends a website, and here it was not the photographs that gave the agency its opening. is anybody down published...
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2013-04-03
LucasArts (1982 - 2013)
lucasarts started in may 1982 as a small games division inside george lucas's film company. it became the dominant point-and-click adventure-game studio of the...
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2013-04-03
Star Wars 1313 (2012 - 2013)
on 3 april 2013 disney ended internal development at lucasarts, kept fewer than ten people to administer licenses, and took the studio's nearly finished games...
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2013-04-02
TVNZ Teletext (1984 - 2013)
a telethon in 1981 raised the money, and the pages went live on 1 february 1984 because deaf new zealanders had no other way to get the news off a television...
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2013-04-01
Yahoo Avatars (2004 - 2013)
yahoo avatars was the cartoon character creator that launched in may 2004 alongside yahoo messenger 6. you built a stylised version of yourself out of preset...
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2013-04-01
Webcomics Nation (2005 - 2013)
webcomics nation was joey manley's webcomic hosting service that launched on 29 july 2005 as a turnkey alternative for cartoonists who did not want to run...
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2013-04-01
Digsby (2008 - 2013)
digsby was a windows im aggregator that logged into eight chat networks at once. it started as an rit mba project, hit meebo/trillian territory, then got...
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2013-04-01
iFrance (1996 - 2013)
ifrance was france's version of the free web-host, a place where anyone could put up a personal page and grab an email address without paying a franc. it...
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2013-04-01
Dai-2 Nippon Television (2005 - 2013)
toshio tsuchiya had already made his name at nippon television with denpa shonen, and in october 2005 he was handed a website instead of a time slot. he...
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2013-04-01
ZUG.com (1995 - 2013)
shortly after midnight on 1 april 2013, a comedy site that had been publishing since 1995 took every article and every forum thread offline in one go. zug was...
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2013-04-01
Yahoo! Message Boards (1997 - 2013)
on 1 march 2013 a yahoo corporate blog post listed the products marissa mayer was retiring that spring, and the message boards were on the list. by then almost...
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2013-04-01
mp3HD (2009 - 2013)
technicolor built a file that was two recordings at once: a normal mp3 any player could read, and a lossless copy folded into the id3 tag where old software...
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2013-03-31
Loopt (2005 - 2013)
loopt was a geosocial network founded by sam altman in 2005 out of y combinator's first batch. it shipped through us carrier partnerships starting with boost...
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2013-03-31
Creative Zen (2004 - 2013)
creative's nine-year attempt to take the mp3 player crown from apple. it won a $100m patent settlement against apple in 2006 and lost the market anyway, with...
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2013-03-31
Trama Virtual (2001 - 2013)
78,675 registered artists and 205,512 songs, all uploaded by the people who made them, all switched off on 31 march 2013. trama virtual was the web arm of a...
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2013-03-31
Punchfork (2011 - 2013)
pinterest made its first acquisition on 3 january 2013 and the thing it bought was a one-man recipe search engine built on twenty thousand dollars of the...
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2013-03-29
Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes (2011 - 2013)
electronic arts closed this one before it ever left beta. wrath of heroes was mythic taking the art and the lore of warhammer online and rebuilding them into a...
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2013-03-21
Multiply (2004 - 2013)
multiply launched in march 2004 as a US social network for family blogs and photo albums, found a much bigger audience in the philippines and indonesia, and...
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2013-03-15
DGamer (2008 - 2013)
dgamer was disney's social network for nintendo ds players. it lived on top of the nintendo wi-fi connection and disappeared the day nintendo retired that...
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2013-03-15
The Boston Phoenix (1965 - 2013)
the boston phoenix was a boston alternative weekly newspaper founded in 1965 by joe hanlon, james t. lewis and larry stark as "boston after dark" and reformed...
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2013-03-15
Simtel (1979 - 2013)
simtel was the shareware archive, started by keith petersen in 1979 for cp/m software and hosted for a decade on an army weapons range in new mexico. it...
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2013-03-15
The Punch (2009 - 2013)
news limited launched the punch in 2009 with david penberthy editing, an opinion site loosely modeled on the huffington post and sold as a place for every...
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2013-03-13
BlogTV (2007 - 2013)
blogtv was the israeli-run live-video site that let anyone with a webcam broadcast a channel while a chat scroll ran alongside it. the whole thing covered the...
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2013-03-13
FeedDemon (2003 - 2013)
feeddemon was the desktop reader for people who treated their feed list like an inbox. nick bradbury built it, sold it to newsgator, and kept improving it for...
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2013-03-13
Adobe BrowserLab (2009 - 2013)
browserlab was a screenshot farm adobe ran so you did not have to keep six browsers and two operating systems on your desk. you handed it a url, picked the...
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2013-03-13
BackTrack (2006 - 2013)
two security live cds merged in 2006 and became the thing everyone booted from a disc instead of installing. it carried the whole toolkit already configured,...
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2013-03-12
Connotea (2004 - 2013)
connotea was nature publishing group's attempt to build del.icio.us for scientists, launched in december 2004 and free the whole way. you pasted a doi and it...
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2013-03-10
Intrade (1999 - 2013)
john delaney died fifty meters below the summit of everest in may 2011, with a daughter born while he was on the mountain, and the prediction market he had run...
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2013-03-08
Snarfer (2005 - 2013)
version 1.0.2 shipped on 15 june 2008 and nothing ever shipped after it. the site stayed up anyway, still advertising the leading rss reader since 2005, still...
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2013-03-05
Twitter @Anywhere (2010 - 2013)
the javascript file is still there. platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js answers today, and what it returns is a function that writes three warnings into your...
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2013-03-01
Suite101.com (1996 - 2013)
suite101 was a vancouver-based contributor-written content platform that paid writers a share of ad revenue. the site peaked around 2009-2010 with 4 million...
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2013-03-01
Bandai Entertainment (1998 - 2013)
bandai entertainment started in 1998 as a california dvd label named after a website, animevillage.com, and grew into the north american arm of the company...
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2013-03-01
eSnips (2004 - 2013)
esnips gave you free storage for any file and folders you could open to the public, and what people put in them was music. that made it one of the sites a song...
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2013-03-01
Plixi (2009 - 2013)
twitter's updated developer rules are what lockerz pointed at on 15 march 2013 when it closed the plixi photo api, though the product had been dying since june...
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2013-03-01
The Web Standards Project (1998 - 2013)
in 1998 a page could render so differently in netscape 4 and internet explorer 4 that professionals shipped two copies of the same site and a script to guess...
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2013-02-28
Mocality (2009 - 2013)
mocality was kenya's largest online business directory built between 2009 and 2013 by stefan magdalinski for naspers. it paid kenyan agents through m-pesa to...
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2013-02-28
Ancestry24 (2004 - 2013)
ancestry24 was the first commercial african genealogy site, launched by media24 in 2004 and built around a researcher in cape town who knew where the paper...
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2013-02-27
Compaq (1982 - 2013)
compaq started in 1982 with three texas instruments engineers building a portable ibm-clone in a houston garage. by the mid 1990s it was the world's largest pc...
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2013-02-26
Fraps (1999 - 2013)
fraps was the windows utility that drew a small yellow frame counter in the corner of your screen and let you record whatever was happening behind it. beepa,...
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2013-02-26
Amplicate (2009 - 2013)
four hundred and fifty million opinions, filed under more than a million topics, each one sorted into love or hate and nothing in between. juan alvarez started...
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2013-02-25
Bada (2010 - 2013)
bada was samsung's quiet attempt to own its own smartphone stack instead of renting android from google. it launched on the samsung wave in may 2010, sold...
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2013-02-25
TVU Player (2010 - 2013)
every viewer was also a server, and that was the whole trick. tvu player pulled a live television channel off a peer to peer swarm and pushed it back out to...
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2013-02-24
Survival Project (2003 - 2013)
four closings over nine years, and only the last one counted. the international servers went in october 2004 and the malaysian english ones in march 2007, with...
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2013-02-22
Memolane (2010 - 2013)
twenty four hours was the whole notice. memolane had spent two and a bit years building an internet time machine, a scrollable lane that pulled your old tweets...
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2013-02-21
1up.com (2003 - 2013)
ziff davis gaming media on the web. heavy podcast network, opinionated editorial, 2003 launch out of the egm + computer gaming world magazine staff. ugo and...
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2013-02-21
UGO Networks (1997 - 2013)
ugo started in '97 as unified gamers online and became undergroundonline in 1999. hearst bought the network in july 2007. ugo bought 1up and electronic gaming...
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2013-02-21
FilePlanet (1999 - 2013)
the gamespy game-file portal where every mod or demo you wanted lived behind a queue. free users waited. fileplanet plus subscribers cut the line for six...
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2013-02-21
PlanetQuake (1996 - 2013)
planetquake was a fan site for one game that turned into a company. mark surfas built it in 1996 to host and distribute the mods people were making for quake,...
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2013-02-19
Freechal (1999 - 2013)
freechal launched in 1999 in seoul, founded by jeon wan, a former samsung c&t employee. the name was a portmanteau of "freedom" and "challenge", and the...
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2013-02-16
Hipster (2011 - 2013)
hipster launched in january 2011 as a cryptic teaser site that collected 10000 email signups in two days without telling anyone what it actually did. the team...
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2013-02-13
Microsoft Live Mesh (2008 - 2013)
live mesh was the consumer face of ray ozzie's vision for microsoft. you ran an agent on each of your pcs, picked folders to keep in sync across them and into...
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2013-02-13
Windows Live Mesh (2008 - 2013)
microsoft's answer to dropbox synced up to 200 folders across your machines and pushed 5 gb to the cloud on the side. it also did remote desktop over the...
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2013-02-12
Opera (Presto era) (2003 - 2013)
presto was the proprietary rendering engine opera software wrote in oslo. it shipped with opera 7 on january 28, 2003 and powered every desktop opera release...
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2013-02-08
OpenSpace.ru (2008 - 2013)
openspace opened on 26 june 2008 as a russian site about contemporary culture, edited by the poet maria stepanova and written by more than five hundred...
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2013-02-07
EveryBlock (2008 - 2013)
everyblock was a hyperlocal news experiment that mapped the web down to a single city block. adrian holovaty built it in 2007 on a knight foundation grant,...
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2013-02-06
Bluefin Labs (2008 - 2013)
deb roy and michael fleischman spun bluefin labs out of mit in 2008 to do social-tv analytics. their product, bluefin signals, read public twitter and facebook...
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2013-02-06
TamaTown (2006 - 2013)
tamatown was the website your tamagotchi went to. from 2006 the connection versions produced a short code on their own tiny screen, you typed it into a flash...
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2013-02-06
Menshn (2012 - 2013)
louise mensch was a sitting conservative mp when she launched a rival to twitter, which is a sentence that could only have been written in 2012. menshn locked...
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2013-02-04
Yardsellr (2010 - 2013)
three former ebay executives started this in san francisco in october 2009 and spent the next three years trying to turn the facebook news feed into a...
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2013-02-02
Nortel Networks (1895 - 2013)
nortel was the canadian telecom-equipment giant that built dms switches and meridian pbx systems and the optical long-haul gear that the dot-com fiber buildout...
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2013-02-01
MiniDisc (1992 - 2013)
sony's beautiful magneto-optical format. small, recordable, durable. it was the dominant portable music format in japan for fifteen years. it had a real...
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2013-02-01
Yahoo Fire Eagle (2008 - 2013)
fire eagle was yahoo's location-broker api, built inside the brickhouse skunkworks in 2007, opened to the public in march 2008, killed in february 2013. you...
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2013-02-01
AdBrite (2002 - 2013)
adbrite put a price tag on the corner of a web page. you clicked Your Ad Here, saw what a week on that site cost, paid it and your banner went up without a...
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2013-02-01
Microsoft XNA (2006 - 2013)
the notice was an email to unpaid volunteers and it was never meant to be read outside that mailing list. it told the mvp award holders that directx was no...
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2013-02-01
Regretsy (2009 - 2013)
april winchell was a voice actress and the daughter of a famous ventriloquist, and in october 2009 she started posting the strangest listings on etsy under the...
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2013-02-01
MyLinkVault (2005 - 2013)
on 22 january 2013 mylinkvault's homepage was 3,713 bytes of working product. on 2 march it was 436 bytes, and by the end of that month it was down to 272 and...
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2013-01-31
Audiogalaxy (1998 - 2013)
audiogalaxy was the p2p tool that felt curated. you queued songs in a web browser and your machine downloaded them in the background, with chat-enabled groups...
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2013-01-31
Stickam (2005 - 2013)
stickam launched in 2005 as one of the first websites you could embed a live webcam stream into another page. by 2012 it had 9.3 million registered users,...
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2013-01-31
Narod.ru (2000 - 2013)
narod.ru launched in 2000 as a free web hosting service operated by yandex, offering a domain on the narod.ru subdomain, unlimited storage, and ftp access. it...
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2013-01-31
Buy.com (1997 - 2013)
buy.com launched in 1997 as scott blum's plan to win e-commerce by selling below cost and making the money back on ads and services. it sold $125 million in...
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2013-01-31
own3D.tv (2009 - 2013)
for a couple of years this was a real rival to Justin.tv for people who wanted to watch others play, especially in the starcraft and counter-strike scenes. it...
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2013-01-31
LinkedIn Answers (2007 - 2013)
for six years linkedin had a working question board attached to it. you asked your network something about your industry, strangers holding the same job title...
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2013-01-31
Nownuri (1994 - 2013)
nownuri was the third of korea's big pc communication services, launched by nowcom in october 1994 and running behind chollian and hitel for its whole life. it...
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2013-01-29
Microsoft Office Picture Manager (2003 - 2013)
office picture manager was the small image editor that nobody chose and everybody used. it shipped in the office bundle from 2003 through 2010. it opened jpegs...
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2013-01-29
Junction Point Studios (2004 - 2013)
warren spector spent the 2000s trying to find a publisher that would let him keep making immersive sims. junction point was the studio he opened to attempt it....
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2013-01-25
Frenzoo (2010 - 2013)
a studio killed its own world to go chase phones. frenzoo was a unity browser world out of hong kong where you dressed an avatar and then showed it to people,...
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2013-01-23
THQ (1990 - 2013)
thq was founded in april 1990 by jack friedman. the name stood for toy headquarters and the first few years were action-figure manufacturing tied to wwf and...
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2013-01-23
Vigil Games (2005 - 2013)
no bid came in. every other thq development studio found a buyer at the january 2013 auction and vigil did not, because it had shipped darksiders ii five...
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2013-01-22
Snip.it (2011 - 2013)
fifteen months from launch to switch-off, and the switch-off happened the same day the acquisition was announced. yahoo wanted ten engineers for its social...
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2013-01-22
Blogs of Note (2001 - 2013)
for twelve years somebody at blogger picked a blog a day and put it on a list, and for a lot of small sites that single line was the biggest traffic day they...
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2013-01-18
Family Guy Online (2012 - 2013)
family guy online was a browser mmo built for fox around a cartoon at the height of its ratings. it opened in public beta on 17 april 2012 with the show's own...
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2013-01-17
eMachines (1998 - 2013)
emachines sold a whole computer for 399 dollars in 1998 and was the fourth largest pc seller in america six months later. the box was never really the product....
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2013-01-15
Nexus Q (2012 - 2013)
the nexus q was a 300 dollar bowling-ball-sized android-powered media streamer that google announced at i/o 2012, gave away to conference attendees, then...
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2013-01-14
Indiana Jones Adventure World (2011 - 2013)
zynga boston shipped adventure world on facebook on 1 september 2011, the first ville-family game with a non-farm theme. on 29 november 2011 the game was...
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2013-01-03
COTOJE.CZ (2002 - 2013)
on 3 january 2013 a czech portal switched off the digitized text of fifty-six encyclopedia volumes, about half a million entries and thirty thousand pictures....
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2013-01-01
ASUS Eee PC (2007 - 2013)
the netbook that started the netbook category. launched october 16 2007 in taiwan, the 701 model shipped with a 7-inch screen, a 900 mhz celeron, 512 mb of...
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2013-01-01
Xandros (2001 - 2013)
xandros was the linux distribution that shipped on the first generation of the asus eee pc, the 2007 netbook that put linux on a million store shelves. the...
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2013-01-01
Handango (1999 - 2013)
the pre-iphone mobile app store. founded 1999 in irving texas to sell software for palm pdas and symbian phones. acquired by pocketgear in 2010 and shuttered...
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2013-01-01
PocketGear (2001 - 2013)
pocketgear was a 2001 cross-platform mobile software catalog. by february 2010 it had bought handango for an undisclosed sum, becoming the largest...
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2013-01-01
LiveVideo.com (2006 - 2013)
livevideo was brad greenspan's attempt to build a second myspace out of video. greenspan had co-founded intermix, the company behind myspace, and after that he...
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2013-01-01
Miro (2006 - 2013)
miro wanted to be television for the open web, a free player that pulled in video podcasts and bittorrent feeds and treated them like channels you subscribed...
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2013-01-01
Syndic8 (2001 - 2013)
syndic8 was a directory of rss and atom feeds that ran from august 2001 into the autumn of 2013, built by jeff barr a year before he went to amazon and kept up...
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2013-01-01
WAP (1999 - 2013)
wap was the mobile web before the mobile web worked. a stripped-down standard from 1999 that served wml pages to tiny phone screens over a slow, metered...
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2013-01-01
NabiscoWorld (1999 - 2013)
nabisco opened a games portal in 1999 and filled it with free flash games in which the product was the level. by 2004 it carried games for seventeen brands and...
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2013-01-01
Video CD (1993 - 2013)
video cd was the white book standard of 1993: mpeg-1 video on an ordinary compact disc at about 1.15 megabits a second, which is vhs quality if you are being...
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2013-01-01
WikiScanner (2007 - 2013)
wikiscanner launched on 13 august 2007 and did exactly one thing. it took every anonymous wikipedia edit made between february 2002 and august 2007, about...
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2013-01-01
Userplane (2001 - 2013)
userplane sold chat as a component. you dropped its widget into your own site, your own users talked to each other inside a box carrying your logo, and...
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2013-01-01
TeaShark (2007 - 2013)
one hundred and forty-five kilobytes was the entire browser. teashark shipped in september 2007 as a java midlet for phones that had nothing worth browsing...
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2013-01-01
SharedCopy (2007 - 2013)
chew choon keat built a way to draw on somebody else's web page and hand the result to a colleague, and for a stretch of 2007 that looked like the next layer...
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2013-01-01
Blistering (1998 - 2013)
robert cotter started it in 1998, when the web was still new enough that a metal magazine could be built on it by people who were not already in publishing....
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2013-01-01
BeatThatQuote.com (2005 - 2013)
7 march 2011 is the day google paid 37.7 million pounds for a british price comparison site. 8 march is the day google pushed that same site off the front page...
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2013-01-01
Daylife (2006 - 2013)
a billion api calls a month, and almost nobody outside a newsroom had heard the name. daylife sold the machinery behind topic pages and photo galleries to...
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2013-01-01
Chowk.com (1997 - 2013)
a chowk is the square where the roads meet, and the site took the name literally. it launched in 1997 for the fiftieth independence day of india and of...
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2013-01-01
Proust (2011 - 2013)
tom cortese built a place that asked you more than a thousand questions about your own life and filed the answers as chapters of it, and barry diller's iac...
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2013-01-01
Ty Girlz (2007 - 2013)
a plush doll with a code sewn onto its tag, sold in american toy aisles from april 2007, and the code unlocked a room in a 3d world at ty-girlz.ty.com. ty inc....
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2013-01-01
GeneTree (1997 - 2013)
terrence carmichael finished a masters in molecular genetics in 1995 and started genetree two years later, selling dna tests whose results you could hang on a...
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2013-01-01
PrivateSky (2011 - 2013)
a division of gchq asked for the keys at the end of 2012, and the company decided the cheapest answer was to switch the product off. privatesky was a british...
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2013
1000Memories (2010 - 2013)
it started as a place to put someone after they died. a free page with a photo wall on it, and somewhere for the people who knew them to write things down....
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2013
Dipdive (2007 - 2013)
a social network built by a musician that had the single biggest video of the 2008 election on it before anybody knew the site existed. four million views...
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2013
FlashGet (1999 - 2013)
before broadband made downloading boring, a file that failed at ninety four percent was simply gone and you began again from zero. flashget opened several...
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2013
Orb Networks (2004 - 2013)
orb was a program you installed on the windows machine at home so that everything on its hard drive became reachable from anywhere else, transcoded on the fly...
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2012-12-31
Color (2011 - 2012)
color was a proximity-based photo-sharing app from bill nguyen and peter pham, launched on march 24, 2011 with $41 million in pre-launch funding from sequoia...
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2012-12-31
DailyBooth (2009 - 2012)
dailybooth was a photoblogging platform built around a single format. one self-portrait per day, with a caption underneath. it launched in february 2009 out of...
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2012-12-31
Mixi (2004 - 2012)
the japanese social network where almost everyone in the country in their twenties had an account at peak. invitation-only entry, a personal diary page, and...
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2012-12-31
Yahoo Korea (1997 - 2012)
yahoo korea launched in september 1997 with the home-team advantage of yahoo's global brand. naver took first place in 2003 and daum took second in 2005. on 31...
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2012-12-31
Vlingo (2006 - 2012)
vlingo was the june 2006 cambridge massachusetts voice assistant by mike phillips and john nguyen. the app shipped on most pre-iphone smartphone platforms,...
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2012-12-31
Nokia N9 (2011 - 2012)
the n9 was nokia's only meego harmattan phone. it shipped 23 september 2011 in a small set of european and latin-american markets, never reached the us, and...
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2012-12-31
Newsweek (original print run) (1933 - 2012)
the us news weekly that lived in the same tier as time for 79 years. thomas martyn started it on 17 february 1933. washington post company owned it from 1961...
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2012-12-31
GameShark (1996 - 2012)
gameshark let you type twelve characters of hexadecimal into a console and change what a game believed about itself. datel built the hardware in england,...
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2012-12-31
Webroot Spy Sweeper (2002 - 2012)
steven thomas and kristen talley started webroot in boulder in july 1997 with a tool that erased browser traces, and five years later they fell into the...
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2012-12-31
Elluminate (2000 - 2012)
calgary built the virtual classroom that most of the english-speaking education world sat in before anyone had heard of zoom. elluminate opened in 2000, and...
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2012-12-31
Planet Cazmo (2007 - 2012)
skate parks and a personal spaceship, plus more than fifty virtual concerts in 2010 alone. planet cazmo ran from 2007 out of a small company whose president...
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2012-12-30
PetVille (2010 - 2012)
petville was a facebook pet simulation game zynga released in 2010, the pet themed sibling of farmville and fishville. you adopted a pixel pet and decorated a...
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2012-12-30
Installous (2009 - 2012)
goodnight, sweet prince was the opening line of the notice. installous was the piracy half of the jailbreak, a cydia package that browsed an index of cracked...
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2012-12-25
Dengeki Comic Japan (2010 - 2012)
every issue was free, back catalog included, which was not how japanese comic publishers behaved in 2010. ascii media works put it out on the 25th of each...
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2012-12-20
Microsoft Expression Web (2006 - 2012)
microsoft tried to do html the grown-up way after frontpage's reputation collapsed. expression web shipped clean markup, no proprietary tags, no shared-borders...
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2012-12-20
Futubra (2012 - 2012)
mail.ru built a russian twitter with a two hundred character limit and pictures attached to everything, opened it in january 2012 and closed it in december of...
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2012-12-20
Microsoft Expression Design (2007 - 2012)
two researchers in hong kong invented skeletal strokes, a way to bend an entire drawing along a curve as if it were a brush loaded with a picture, and built a...
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2012-12-20
Microsoft Expression Encoder (2007 - 2012)
the free edition is the one that mattered. microsoft shipped expression encoder in september 2007 as the transcoder that fed silverlight, sold a pro version...
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2012-12-18
Yahoo! Rikunabi (2004 - 2012)
recruit had the listings and yahoo japan had the audience, so in april 2004 they put both behind a single brand and pointed every yahoo user at it. the...
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2012-12-18
Naneun Ggomsuda (2011 - 2012)
four men in a room in seoul, talking about the president, for twenty months. it was published by ddanzi ilbo rather than by a broadcaster, it averaged two...
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2012-12-17
Ameba Pico (2010 - 2012)
ameba pico was the english-language port of cyberagent's ameba pigg virtual world, launched on facebook on 11 march 2010 as the first product of cyberagent's...
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2012-12-15
The Daily (2011 - 2012)
the daily was rupert murdoch's bet that people would pay for a newspaper that only existed on an ipad. it launched in early 2011, ran for less than two years,...
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2012-12-15
Verizon V CAST (2005 - 2012)
the verizon mobile portal that piped video and music over 3g ev-do straight to feature phones and early smartphones from february 2005 to december 15 2012. it...
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2012-12-14
Yahoo! Chat (1997 - 2012)
yahoo chat was a separate product from yahoo messenger. it ran in the browser as a java applet and drew its own crowd of regulars, until a 2005 advertiser...
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2012-12-14
OpenFeint (2009 - 2012)
openfeint was the achievements and leaderboards layer that mobile games bolted on before apple and google shipped their own. you did not choose it. you opened...
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2012-12-13
Sympatico (1995 - 2012)
sympatico was the page that opened when a canadian opened a browser. bell and the other incumbent phone companies launched it on 29 november 1995 alongside...
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2012-12-11
Nintendo Power (1988 - 2012)
the official nintendo of america print magazine. born july 1988 with a free 3.6 million copy run mailed out to fun club members. ended at issue 285 in december...
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2012-12-09
Glitch (2011 - 2012)
glitch was a flash-based browser mmo built by tiny speck, the studio stewart butterfield founded after leaving yahoo in 2008. it ran on charm rather than...
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2012-12-09
NZBMatrix (2007 - 2012)
nzbmatrix indexed usenet. it stored no files at all, it read the raw binary groups and produced a small pointer file telling your downloader which scattered...
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2012-12-08
WSO2 Mashup Server (2008 - 2012)
january 2008, and a sri lankan open source company shipped the first mashup server anybody could download and read the source of. you wrote javascript in a...
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2012-12-07
Adobe Flash Builder (2005 - 2012)
flash builder was the eclipse-based ide adobe sold to flex developers between 2005 and 2012. it started as macromedia flex builder 1.0 in june 2005, was...
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2012-12-06
Pobieraczek.pl (2008 - 2012)
thirty thousand complaints arrived in the first nine months and the service ran for three more years after that. pobieraczek sold ten free days of downloading...
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2012-12-06
Eurocom (1988 - 2012)
around seventy shipped games in twenty four years, and the front of the box almost never said eurocom. the derby studio did bond, mortal kombat, crash...
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2012-12-05
FishVille (2009 - 2012)
fishville shipped on facebook 6 november 2009 as zynga's aquarium sibling to farmville. you bought pixel fish, fed them through three growth stages, sold them...
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2012-12-05
Vampire Wars (2008 - 2012)
vampire wars shipped on facebook in june 2008 as zynga's vampire-themed version of mafia wars. clan-recruitment and turn-based combat, real money for premium...
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2012-12-05
Treasure Isle (2010 - 2012)
treasure isle shipped on facebook 4 april 2010 as zynga's beach-dig game, the ville-family cousin that swapped fields for sand and gems for coins. energy...
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2012-12-05
RewardVille (2011 - 2012)
twenty-one months is how long zynga ran a loyalty scheme across its own games. rewardville handed out zcoins and zpoints for playing farmville or cityville,...
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2012-12-04
Fictionwise (2000 - 2012)
the multi-format ebook store that predated the kindle by seven years. founded on 5 june 2000 by brothers steve and scott pendergrast, it sold titles in...
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2012-12-03
Tungle.me (2006 - 2012)
tungle was a scheduling tool that sat on top of whatever calendar you already had and let other people book time with you without the email back-and-forth. it...
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2012-12-03
AdSense for Feeds (2005 - 2012)
the only money feedburner ever made came from an ad slot inside other people's rss. google opened that slot as a public beta in may 2005, two years before it...
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2012-12-03
Twistory (2008 - 2012)
twitter's api rewrite in 2012 took a long list of small tools down with it and this was one of them. tijs vrolix built twistory in a belgian town in 2008 to...
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2012-12-02
kreuz.net (2004 - 2012)
berlin prosecutors opened an incitement investigation in 2012, and a reward of fifteen thousand euros went up for anyone who could name the people running the...
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2012-12-01
Lotus Notes (1989 - 2012)
lotus notes was the desktop client for the lotus domino server, the dominant corporate email and groupware stack of the 1990s. ibm bought lotus in 1995 for...
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2012-12-01
Webshots (1995 - 2012)
webshots started in 1995 as a sports-themed screensaver you bought at retail. by 1999 the founders had pulled it onto the web and turned it into one of the...
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2012-12-01
Barnes & Noble Nook Color (2010 - 2012)
the nook color was the device that almost made barnes and noble a hardware company. seven inches, color ips screen, customized android 2.2, $249 at launch in...
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2012-12-01
Zoopy (2006 - 2012)
cape town built a south african youtube in 2006 and vodacom liked it enough to buy all of it, in three steps, across two years. in february 2011 the site...
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2012-12-01
CastTV (2006 - 2012)
edwin ong and alex vikati built a search engine for video in 2006, back when finding a television episode online meant knowing which of forty sites had it....
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2012-12-01
Paxfire (2004 - 2012)
in august 2011 berkeley researchers published proof that a set of american isps were routing their subscribers' yahoo and bing searches through a middlebox...
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2012-12-01
Gougou (2007 - 2012)
the office of the us trade representative put gougou on its notorious markets list on 13 december 2012, and the site was gone before the month ended. xunlei...
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2012-11-30
City of Heroes (2004 - 2012)
city of heroes was a superhero subscription mmo. ncsoft pulled the plug in november 2012 with about a hundred thousand active subscribers still on the rolls....
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2012-11-30
Ozú (1996 - 2012)
spain got two homegrown search engines in the same year, and ozú was the one with the andalusian name. it arrived in 1996 alongside olé, back when finding...
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2012-11-30
Taiwan Forum (2004 - 2012)
over a million taiwanese accounts, and a music section that kept getting the site raided. 台灣論壇 opened in march 2004 and spent eight years as the largest web...
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2012-11-29
Cover Flow (2006 - 2012)
the rotating 3d album-art carousel that made every steve jobs keynote from 2007 to 2012 feel like the future. invented by andrew coulter enright, implemented...
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2012-11-28
Newzbin (2002 - 2012)
newzbin did not host anything. it read usenet and worked out which scattered binary posts belonged to which film, then handed you a small file that told your...
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2012-11-28
EveryScape (2007 - 2012)
waltham, massachusetts spent a decade on the idea that a city should be walkable from a browser, and not from the middle of the road. everyscape stitched...
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2012-11-26
The Totally Rad Show (2007 - 2012)
760 episodes, the last of them an hour and three minutes long, made by three friends in front of a bedsheet-sized green screen in a garage. it started weekly...
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2012-11-25
asparaclub (2004 - 2012)
the asahi shimbun wanted a reason for its paper readers to hold an account, so in october 2004 it opened a club named after a vegetable and sorted the members...
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2012-11-23
Joystick (1988 - 2012)
joystick started on 9 november 1988 as a thirty two page weekly of cheat codes and reviews, went monthly in january 1990, and spent the next twenty two years...
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2012-11-19
vWorker (Rent A Coder) (2001 - 2012)
a marketplace for programming work, opened by ian ippolito in tampa in 2001 under the name rent a coder. you posted a job, coders bid on it blind without...
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2012-11-16
Loosecubes (2010 - 2012)
brooklyn, june 2010. campbell mckellar and anna thomas built a marketplace out of a fact every office already knew about itself, which is that there are always...
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2012-11-13
Navteq (1985 - 2012)
navteq spent twenty-seven years building the part you never saw, which is the underlying road data that in-car navigation ran on. it started in 1985 in a...
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2012-11-11
Final Fantasy XIV (1.0) (2010 - 2012)
square enix shipped a numbered final fantasy as an mmo in september 2010 and it landed at 49 on metacritic, which for that name was less a bad score than an...
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2012-11-08
Adobe Flash Lite (2003 - 2012)
flash lite was the mobile subset of macromedia and then adobe flash, built for handsets without enough cpu to run the desktop player. ntt docomo shipped it...
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2012-11-06
Life with PlayStation (2008 - 2012)
life with playstation was the ps3 application sony wrapped around the folding@home client, putting stanford's protein simulations behind a spinning globe that...
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2012-11-05
MojaGeneracja.pl (2007 - 2012)
mojageneracja was the social network the gadu-gadu company built on top of the messenger half of poland already left running all day. it opened in february...
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2012-11-02
CompUSA (1984 - 2012)
compusa was the place you walked into in the us to buy a beige tower or a stack of cd-r media. the format never really reached turkey. the brand was on its way...
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2012-11-01
Piczo (2003 - 2012)
piczo was the personal-website builder for british 13-16 year olds in the bebo years. jim conning launched it from san francisco in 2003, but the user base...
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2012-11-01
Sugababes.nl (2001 - 2012)
on 3 october 2012 the front page of sugababes.nl reported nine babes and seventeen dudes online. eleven years earlier the same site had been the place dutch...
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2012-11-01
High Impact Games (2004 - 2012)
a burbank studio full of insomniac alumni made the ratchet and clank games that fit on a psp, starting with size matters in february 2007 and finishing with a...
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2012-11-01
co.cc (2007 - 2012)
13,551,191 domains on its own counter in october 2012, and a month later none of them resolved. co.cc was a company in goyang, south korea that owned one .cc...
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2012-11-01
Google Listen (2009 - 2012)
580,000 people a month were using it when google decided it was not needed. listen was the first podcast app google ever shipped, out of labs in august 2009,...
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2012-11-01
Boyfriend Maker (2012 - 2012)
apple took it down in the last week of november 2012, three days after the trade press published transcripts of what the virtual boyfriend had been telling...
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2012-11-01
Web Intents (2010 - 2012)
greg billock mailed the obituary to a w3c list at 11:47 on the morning of 1 november 2012, in one paragraph, and nobody argued with him. web intents was...
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2012-10-29
CubeDuel (2011 - 2012)
fifty thousand votes went in on the first day. adam doppelt and tony wright had built hot or not for your own colleagues, with the faces coming straight out of...
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2012-10-26
Vector Markup Language (1998 - 2012)
two rival proposals landed at the w3c five weeks apart in 1998, one from microsoft and one from adobe. the committee took neither and built svg out of both....
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2012-10-25
Koders (2005 - 2012)
before stack overflow existed and before any code host had a search box worth using, finding out how somebody else had solved your problem meant searching...
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2012-10-25
Megite (2006 - 2012)
by early 2006 the tech blogosphere had a handful of crawlers fighting over the same job, which was working out what everyone was arguing about that morning....
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2012-10-23
Ceefax (1974 - 2012)
ceefax was the bbc's teletext service. it ran for thirty-eight years inside the vertical blanking interval of the analog tv signal, the unused lines between...
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2012-10-20
Kingfisher Airlines (2005 - 2012)
six thousand people stopped being paid in march 2012 and kept flying anyway until the pilots walked out at the end of september. vijay mallya's airline was...
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2012-10-19
Facebook Questions (2010 - 2012)
quora opened to the public in june 2010 and facebook shipped a reply within weeks. questions launched that july as a real question-and-answer product, buckled...
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2012-10-19
Google Music Search (2009 - 2012)
140 record labels handed over their catalogs and the downloads were free. in march 2009 google china launched a music search with a beijing company called...
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2012-10-19
The Locker Project (2010 - 2012)
jeremie miller had already written the protocol behind jabber when he opened this repository in december 2010. the idea was a program you ran yourself that...
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2012-10-17
Directgov (2004 - 2012)
britain's attempt at one website for the whole state, live on 1 april 2004 to replace ukonline.gov.uk. you went to it for a car tax question or a passport form...
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2012-10-15
Microsoft Zune (2006 - 2012)
microsoft's iPod competitor. arrived in 2006, five years after the iPod had won. brown was a launch color, which became the joke. the hardware was actually...
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2012-10-15
Zune Social (2007 - 2012)
microsoft launched zune social in november 2007 as the community layer on top of the zune ecosystem. the zune card, the wireless song passes between devices...
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2012-10-15
Qaiku (2010 - 2012)
a microblog built to save the one it grew up on. when google bought jaiku and let it go stale, a finnish shop called rohea made qaiku to carry the same crowd...
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2012-10-05
Motorola Atrix Lapdock (2011 - 2012)
the atrix lapdock was the cleanest version of the phone-as-laptop pitch. you slid an atrix 4g into the back of a thin clamshell, the lapdock booted motorola's...
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2012-10-01
Ya.com (1999 - 2012)
ya.com was spain's number-two web portal, spun up in 1999 by martin varsavsky and a group of people who had just walked out of terra. it was the second-biggest...
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2012-10-01
VirusBuster (1992 - 2012)
a budapest antivirus house that started in the late eighties under the name virsec, took the virusbuster name in 1992 and spent most of its life on hungarian...
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2012-10-01
JS-Kit Echo (2006 - 2012)
a cisco security engineer wrote a comment widget as a side project in 2006 and it grew into a company that bought haloscan. js-kit renamed itself echo in...
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2012-10-01
FlexComixブラッド (FlexComix Blood) (2007 - 2012)
softbank creative killed monthly shonen blood after seven issues in 2006 and most of its serials came back the following january as a free website inside...
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2012-10-01
Intel Array Building Blocks (2010 - 2012)
five years of research and one acquisition went into this. arbb came out of intel's ct project and the rapidmind team intel bought in 2009, and it offered...
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2012-09-30
Apple Ping (2010 - 2012)
apple ping was a social network inside itunes 10. you followed artists and you saw what your friends bought. steve jobs introduced it on 1 september 2010 as...
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2012-09-28
Phantasy Star Universe (2006 - 2012)
phantasy star universe was sega's attempt to take phantasy star online's offline-plus-online formula into a wider mmo experience. it shipped on pc and ps2 in...
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2012-09-28
EMI (1931 - 2012)
guy hands had never worked in the music business when his private equity firm paid 4.2 billion pounds for emi in august 2007, most of it borrowed from...
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2012-09-27
Endless.com (2007 - 2012)
endless was amazon's first separately-branded ecommerce site, launched in december 2007 as a shoes-and-handbags property positioned against zappos. amazon shut...
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2012-09-27
Google Insights for Search (2008 - 2012)
google trends was the public toy. insights for search, opened on 5 august 2008, was the same search-volume data with the controls an advertiser actually...
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2012-09-26
Black Prophecy (2011 - 2012)
a studio of about fifty people in hannover spent five years on a space combat mmo where you bolted your own ship together out of parts instead of picking one...
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2012-09-26
CIA.vc (2003 - 2012)
a hosting provider deleted the database, nobody had a backup, and the commit messages of ten thousand open source repositories stopped arriving in their irc...
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2012-09-21
Elder Pastitsios (2011 - 2012)
a golden dawn mp put a question to the greek justice minister about a facebook page on 17 september 2012. four days later the man who ran it was arrested for...
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2012-09-20
Speex (2003 - 2012)
nine days after opus 1.0 came out, an orange box appeared on speex.org saying the codec had been obsoleted by it. the same foundation wrote both. speex had...
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2012-09-19
Rypple (2008 - 2012)
rypple set out to kill the annual performance review and replace it with small amounts of feedback all year round. two founders in toronto who had already sold...
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2012-09-17
VilaBOL (1996 - 2012)
brazil's free homepage service, run out of BOL, the free-access portal that uol absorbed in 1996. fifteen megabytes, a builder for people who did not want to...
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2012-09-15
Gist (2008 - 2012)
t.a. mccann left microsoft's exchange group to build the thing exchange never did: an address book that filled itself in. gist read your mail, worked out who...
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2012-09-11
An Fear Rua (2000 - 2012)
liam cahill started an fear rua in september 2000 and ran it for twelve years as the place irish gaelic games argued with itself, in english and in irish,...
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2012-09-11
Andriasang (2008 - 2012)
anoop gantayat left ign's japan desk in 2008 and started posting the same work under his own domain, usually within hours of the japanese press release...
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2012-09-09
KOffice (2000 - 2012)
koffice was the office suite kde wrote for itself, first released with kde 2.0 in october 2000 and cited by microsoft in the antitrust trial as evidence that...
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2012-09-06
Wunderkit (2012 - 2012)
four hundred thousand people signed up in seven months and it was still the one berlin killed. 6wunderkinder had a hit in wunderlist and wanted a platform...
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2012-09-05
Seesmic (2008 - 2012)
seesmic was three products in four years. it started in 2008 as a video-comment platform, the founder loïc le meur framed it as a cross between youtube and...
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2012-09-05
Timberwolf (2010 - 2012)
six thousand seven hundred and thirty two euros bought an amigaos 4 build of firefox 4.0.1, and the bounty closed seven weeks before the final release...
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2012-09-03
Webコミックゲッキン (YOMBAN) (2009 - 2012)
a home video company ran a free comic site for three and a half years to feed its own anime licenses, and accidentally published a future akutagawa prize...
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2012-09-01
AtomFilms (1998 - 2012)
late-90s short-film portal out of seattle. independent shorts, animated content, the official star wars fan film awards in partnership with lucasfilm starting...
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2012-09-01
ZunZuneo (2010 - 2012)
usaid hired creative associates international and mobile accord to build a sms-only twitter clone for cuba, routed through a cayman islands shell-company bank...
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2012-09-01
Chomp (2009 - 2012)
chomp was a search engine for mobile apps, one of the first tools that let you find apps by what they did rather than by name. apple acquired it on 24 february...
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2012-09-01
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (2011 - 2012)
announced in march 2005 for a release later that same year, gods and heroes reached players in june 2011 with a different company's name on the box. perpetual...
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2012-09-01
VizWoz (2008 - 2012)
doug richard, two series into dragons' den, chaired a birmingham startup building a 3d hangout for eleven-year-olds. it launched on a friday in march 2008 and...
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2012-08-31
Chumby (2006 - 2012)
chumby launched at o'reilly foo camp on 25 august 2006 as a small wifi-connected bedside appliance with a touchscreen wrapped in leather, running a modified...
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2012-08-31
Parodius Networking (1994 - 2012)
eighteen years of free hosting for emulation pages, nes development documentation and shrines to games nobody else would carry. jeremy chadwick ran parodius...
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2012-08-30
Microsoft Reader (2000 - 2012)
microsoft reader was the company's bet on the consumer e-reading market in 2000. it ran on Pocket PC PDAs and on Windows desktops. ebooks shipped as.lit files...
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2012-08-28
Logitech Squeezebox (2001 - 2012)
squeezebox was the slim devices networked audio player that streamed your local music library to a wall-warted box plugged into a hi-fi receiver. logitech...
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2012-08-28
Yahoo Koprol (2009 - 2012)
koprol was an indonesian location-based social network built by pt skyeight indonesia, launched in jakarta in february 2009 by satya witoelar with three...
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2012-08-27
Diaspora (2010 - 2012)
diaspora was the federated alternative to facebook that arrived three years too early. four nyu students kickstarted it in 2010 with a ten thousand dollar goal...
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2012-08-22
Kazaa (2001 - 2012)
the mp3 sharing app of choice after napster got sued. kazaa, limewire, and bearshare all ran on similar networks and all bundled spyware. you used them anyway...
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2012-08-22
Psygnosis (1984 - 2012)
psygnosis was put together in liverpool in 1984 out of the wreck of imagine software, and for a decade its owl on a red border was the mark that told you an...
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2012-08-20
Google Video (2005 - 2012)
google video was the video-hosting service google launched in january 2005 and then made instantly redundant by buying youtube in october 2006. it kept...
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2012-08-20
Cinch.fm (2009 - 2012)
cinch.fm was the mobile micro-podcasting product built by blogtalkradio parent cinchcast, launched in october 2009. the pitch was one-tap audio blogging by...
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2012-08-13
Planet Half-Life (1999 - 2012)
planet half-life started as one fan's news page about a single game and became the biggest site in gamespy's planet network, which for about a decade was where...
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2012-08-09
Xperia Play (2011 - 2012)
xperia play was the only playstation-branded smartphone ever shipped. sony ericsson built it as a slide-out gamepad android phone with the dpad and playstation...
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2012-08-06
Yellow Dog Linux (1999 - 2012)
the linux distribution for powerpc macs. terra soft solutions in loveland colorado shipped the first release in march 1999 for the imac and power mac...
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2012-08-01
Cisco ūmi (2010 - 2012)
cisco announced umi on october 6, 2010 and shipped it on november 14 the same year as a consumer telepresence product for the living room. the box was a $599...
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2012-08-01
TeamXbox (2000 - 2012)
teamxbox was the ign-owned xbox fan-community and news site that ran from 2000 to 2012. brent soboleski and steve barton founded it around the original xbox...
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2012-08-01
HiPiHi (2006 - 2012)
hipihi was china's second life, founded in beijing in april 2006 by xu hui and rao xuewei, and for about two years it was the project foreign reporters flew in...
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2012-08-01
Twick.it (2009 - 2012)
twitter's character limit pointed at wikipedia's job. markus möller and sean andrew kollak opened it in november 2009 and asked people to explain anything at...
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2012-08-01
Video Toaster (1990 - 2012)
newtek shipped a full-length card for the amiga 2000 in december 1990 that did most of what a hundred-thousand-dollar grass valley switcher did, for two...
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2012-08-01
The SCO Group (2002 - 2012)
darl mcbride took over a linux company in june 2002 and by march 2003 it was suing ibm for a billion dollars, sending demand letters to fifteen hundred...
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2012-08-01
Pacific Fibre (2010 - 2012)
a funding gap of four hundred million new zealand dollars is what killed pacific fibre, a company that spent two and a half years trying to put a second cable...
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2012-08-01
Zecco (2006 - 2012)
forty free stock trades a month, no minimum balance, paid for by advertising on the website. that was the offer in july 2006 and it held for about fifteen...
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2012-08-01
CyberNet Worlds (2000 - 2012)
a download counter is the closest thing this place has to a last will. on 19 july 2012 at 11:03:30 somebody pulled cybernet982.exe off the server, the 16,131st...
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2012-07-31
Google Notebook (2006 - 2012)
google notebook was the clip-and-save tool that lived between google search and gmail. development stopped on 14 january 2009. the service kept running...
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2012-07-31
Paran (2004 - 2012)
kth launched paran in july 2004 by folding its hanmir portal into the user base it had inherited from hitel, and the point of it was to make korea telecom a...
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2012-07-27
TOC protocol (1998 - 2012)
aol published this one on purpose. toc was a plain ascii wrapper that sat in front of the closed oscar protocol and translated for anybody writing their own...
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2012-07-25
iChat (2002 - 2012)
ichat shipped in august 2002 with mac os x 10.2 jaguar as apple's first native aim client. ichat av added video conferencing in 2003, with four-way conferences...
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2012-07-25
Microsoft Flight (2012 - 2012)
released on 29 february 2012 and canceled on 25 july 2012, which is one hundred and forty seven days of life for a product meant to carry the flight simulator...
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2012-07-25
Thinkfuse (2010 - 2012)
salesforce bought two engineers on 25 june 2012 and switched off their product thirty days later. thinkfuse had taken the weekly status report, the most...
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2012-07-25
Xgrid (2004 - 2012)
apple spent much of the 2000s selling the idea that a room full of macs could behave as one computer, and xgrid was the part that made it literally true. a...
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2012-07-25
Hashable (2010 - 2012)
you met someone, you typed #justmet and their name, and the app remembered the introduction for you. do enough of it and you climbed a leaderboard for your...
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2012-07-22
ijji (2006 - 2012)
nhn built an american front door for korean free-to-play games and then sold the door. ijji ran gunz and soldier front off one login and one wallet, and it...
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2012-07-21
Token Ring (1985 - 2012)
ibm was right about the technology and it did not help. a station only transmits when it holds the token, so there are no collisions and the worst-case delay...
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2012-07-20
Sparrow (2011 - 2012)
french indie team builds the prettiest gmail client on the mac, becomes the top paid app on the mac app store its first day, ships an iphone version a year...
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2012-07-18
GirlSense (2007 - 2012)
g-cents stopped being applicable on 18 july 2012, which is how the farewell notice put it. girlsense was a flash site where teenage girls drew clothing and ran...
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2012-07-15
Kung Fu Panda World (2010 - 2012)
kung fu panda world was dreamworks animation's browser world for children, built by humanature studios over two and a half years for around ten million...
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2012-07-12
Digg (the original) (2004 - 2012)
the news site where users voted on what made the front page. peak around 2007. the v4 redesign in august 2010 destroyed the user base in two weeks. reddit...
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2012-07-11
Meebo (2005 - 2012)
meebo launched in september 2005 from a three-person founding team in palo alto. it was an in-browser front-end for every major instant messaging network at...
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2012-07-11
Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator) (2003 - 2012)
konfabulator was a desktop widget runtime that arlo rose shipped for mac os x in february 2003, two years before apple's dashboard. yahoo bought pixoria in...
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2012-07-11
Microsoft ActiveSync (1996 - 2012)
before a phone could reach a server on its own, it reached a desktop over a cable, and on windows that cable was owned by activesync. it shipped in september...
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2012-07-10
Windows Sidebar / Desktop Gadgets (2007 - 2012)
windows sidebar shipped with windows vista in january 2007 and brought back desktop widgets in a hosted javascript runtime. eleven preinstalled gadgets came in...
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2012-07-09
Rockstar Vancouver (1998 - 2012)
six developers walked out of radical entertainment in 1998 and started barking dog studios in vancouver, where they built most of a counter-strike beta update...
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2012-07-05
Ping.fm (2008 - 2012)
ping.fm was the one status update, posted everywhere, before hootsuite and buffer made it a product category. seesmic bought it in january 2010, rebranded it...
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2012-07-05
Windows Home Server (2007 - 2012)
windows home server was a computer you put in a cupboard and stopped looking at. it backed up every pc in the house overnight, keeping one copy of the files...
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2012-07-03
Picplz (2010 - 2012)
picplz launched in november 2010 out of mixed media labs, the san francisco company run by dalton caldwell after imeem. it was a filtered mobile photo network...
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2012-07-03
CityCaucus.com (2008 - 2012)
nearly 2,400 posts in three and a half years, all of them about the municipal politics of one canadian city. daniel fontaine had been chief of staff to a...
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2012-07-02
Kodak Gallery (1999 - 2012)
ofoto launched in 1999 as a website that would print your digital photos and ship them to your door. kodak bought it in 2001 and rebranded it as kodak gallery....
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2012-07-02
aQuantive (1997 - 2012)
aquantive was the seattle ad-tech holding company microsoft paid six billion for in august 2007 as the biggest cheque in microsoft's history at that date. it...
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2012-07-02
AboveNet (1993 - 2012)
abovenet sold the wire itself. it started in 1993 renting out co-location space and guaranteed bandwidth next to the big california peering points, got bought...
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2012-07-01
Grono.net (2004 - 2012)
poland had a social network before nasza-klasa took the country. grono.net was invite-only, the invites traded on auction sites, and for a couple of years...
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2012-07-01
OmniWeb (1995 - 2012)
omniweb was the indie mac browser the omni group started on nextstep in 1995. it survived the os x transition, switched from its proprietary engine to webkit...
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2012-07-01
8Realms (2011 - 2012)
8realms was a browser-based massively multiplayer strategy game by runescape studio jagex. the closed beta opened on 5 may 2011 with a civilization-style...
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2012-07-01
aka-aki (2008 - 2012)
aka-aki was a berlin startup with an almost romantic idea, that your phone should notice other members standing near you over bluetooth and tell you what you...
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2012-07-01
Openbook (2010 - 2012)
three people in san francisco spent an afternoon in may 2010 wiring up the search api that facebook had opened three weeks earlier, and produced a site where...
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2012-07-01
The Word (2003 - 2012)
one hundred and fourteen issues over nine and a half years, and the last one was cover-dated august 2012. david hepworth and jerry perkins built the word at...
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2012-07-01
ScriptLance (2001 - 2012)
freelancer.com announced the purchase on 9 july 2012 and the domain was pointing at a freelancer marketing page before the month was out. what it bought was...
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2012-06-30
Apple iDisk (2000 - 2012)
idisk was apple's pre-icloud answer to "where does a mac put files online." it started free at 20mb in 2000 with itools and turned into a paid feature of.mac...
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2012-06-30
Apple iWeb (2006 - 2012)
iweb was apple's wysiwyg site builder for people who owned a mac and a.mac account. it shipped with ilife '06 in january 2006, gave you template-driven pages...
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2012-06-30
Minitel (1980 - 2012)
the french national online network. you got a small terminal for free from the post office. you typed 3615 plus a service code and you were online, doing your...
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2012-06-30
MobileMe (2008 - 2012)
mobileme was apple's $99/year cloud-sync service that nobody outside the apple universe paid for. it launched the same week as the iphone 3g and broke...
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2012-06-30
Wakoopa (2007 - 2012)
wakoopa was a small amsterdam tracker plus social layer. a background agent watched which desktop apps you used and posted the activity to a friend feed. the...
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2012-06-30
X.25 (1976 - 2012)
the standard that made data networks national before anyone could afford to make them global. the ccitt finished it in 1976 and the state phone monopolies...
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2012-06-30
Transpac (1978 - 2012)
france opened a public packet network in december 1978 with fifteen hundred connections available, built on a standard that french engineers had helped write...
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2012-06-29
Restaurant City (2009 - 2012)
april 2009, and playfish put a restaurant on facebook where the staff were your actual friends, listed by name and photograph. it reached over eighteen million...
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2012-06-27
Schlecker (1975 - 2012)
fourteen thousand shops across ten european countries, most of them small and staffed by two people. anton schlecker built the chain out of ehingen from 1975...
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2012-06-26
Gaopeng (2011 - 2012)
a hundred million dollars, half of it groupon's and half of it tencent's, bought sixteen months of chinese group buying and about two percent of the market....
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2012-06-22
Summify (2010 - 2012)
two romanian engineers in vancouver built the thing every feed reader needed and nobody had shipped: not everything, just the handful of stories your own...
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2012-06-18
Face.com (2009 - 2012)
face.com was a tel aviv facial-recognition startup founded in 2009. by february 2011 its api had scanned 18 billion faces across third-party photo apps and its...
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2012-06-15
Lightbox.com (2011 - 2012)
lightbox was an android photo app in the short window when android had almost none. it turned your uploads into a running photo blog, and by late 2011 it was...
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2012-06-14
XHTML+Voice (2001 - 2012)
opera 12 shipped on 14 june 2012 with a line in its changelog saying voice was gone because the third party vendor no longer supported the speech library. the...
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2012-06-13
Habbo Hotel (peak era) (2000 - 2012)
the pixel-art virtual hotel where you were a small standing avatar in a pixel hotel room. you decorated rooms. you traded furniture. you flirted with strangers...
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2012-06-13
TwitVid (2009 - 2012)
twitvid was to video what twitpic was to photos. a link-and-embed workflow bolted onto twitter that carried nearly every uploaded clip in 2010 and 2011. once...
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2012-06-08
Jump On It (2009 - 2012)
before it sold a single voucher, jump on it built facebook pages called i love sydney and i love melbourne and waited for people to join them. selling local...
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2012-06-07
38 Studios (2006 - 2012)
38 studios was the kind of game studio whose collapse you read about on engadget the morning after, not the kind you ever interacted with. curt schilling (the...
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2012-06-05
Quepasa (1997 - 2012)
quepasa started as a hispanic-targeted web portal in phoenix in 1997, ipo'd on nyse in 1999, crashed with the rest of the dot-com cohort, was revived in the...
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2012-06-01
Eons.com (2006 - 2012)
eons.com was jeff taylor's second act after monster.com. it launched in july 2006 as a social network for people over fifty, ran into a wall trying to recreate...
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2012-06-01
myYearbook (2005 - 2012)
three new jersey siblings built it in 2005 during spring break of their sophomore and junior years of high school. it grew into a teen social network with...
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2012-06-01
Backpack (2005 - 2012)
37signals built backpack in 2005 as a calm little organizer for your own pages and lists, part of the argument that software could be simple on purpose. in...
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2012-06-01
QOOP (2005 - 2012)
three founders in mill valley started a print-on-demand outfit in 2005 and wired it into flickr the same year, so the photographs already sitting in your...
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2012-06-01
ZumoDrive (2009 - 2012)
zumodrive came out of zecter, a y combinator startup, and went into private beta in january 2009 with an idea dropbox did not have. instead of syncing a folder...
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2012-06-01
FBML (Facebook Markup Language) (2007 - 2012)
in 2007 facebook decided the html the rest of the web ran on was not enough for it, and shipped a dialect of its own. you wrote an fb:name tag with a user id...
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2012-06-01
Hírszerző.hu (2005 - 2012)
july 2005 to june 2012, seven years of hungarian political journalism written for readers who wanted the argument rather than the wire feed. it doubled its...
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2012-06-01
Needlebase (2010 - 2012)
google paid seven hundred million dollars for a flight search company and a scraping tool came along in the box. needlebase let you point at a web page, tag...
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2012-06-01
FileSoup (2003 - 2012)
thegeeker opened filesoup in february 2003, months before the pirate bay existed, and ran it from england as a forum that taught people how bittorrent worked....
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2012-06-01
Webスピカ (2008 - 2012)
gentosha comics ran a manga magazine you could not read without installing a plugin called crochet, sold through a bookstore called voyager, on a website that...
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2012-06-01
Fastladder (2007 - 2012)
tokyo had built one of the quickest feed readers on the web and then tried it in english. fastladder launched on 3 july 2007, the same keyboard-driven engine...
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2012-06
Bixee (2005 - 2012)
two ex-yahoo engineers, rajesh warrier and ruban phukan, launched a vertical search engine over india's job listings in october 2005 and spent the next year...
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2012-05-31
Tenbit.pl (1998 - 2012)
tenbit.pl was a polish entertainment portal for teenagers, started in april 1998 and big enough by the mid-2000s that it had its own late-night television show...
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2012-05-31
Microsoft Hohm (2009 - 2012)
most home energy products of 2009 opened by asking what hardware you owned. this one opened by asking how old your water heater was. microsoft licensed a...
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2012-05-31
Wikipedia Review (2005 - 2012)
wikipedia outlasted its own watchdog by more than a decade. the review opened on proboards in november 2005 and moved to its own domain on 19 february 2006,...
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2012-05-30
Yahoo Babel Fish (1997 - 2012)
babel fish was the first time a normal web user could paste a paragraph in spanish and read it back in something resembling english, for free, without...
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2012-05-30
Twango (2004 - 2012)
twango was a media-sharing site launched in 2004 in redmond, washington by jim laurel with four co-founders out of the local ex-microsoft circle. it supported...
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2012-05-30
Tabblo (2006 - 2012)
tabblo was a bay-area photo-storytelling site that let you drop pictures into printable poster layouts. hp bought it in march 2007, mostly for the underlying...
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2012-05-25
Yahoo Livestand (2011 - 2012)
livestand was a yahoo ipad app that turned your reading history into a personalized magazine. it shipped in november 2011 as a flipboard competitor and sat for...
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2012-05-25
Yahoo! Meme (2009 - 2012)
yahoo meme was a microblogging service launched out of yahoo's brazil office in august 2009 as a hybrid of twitter and tumblr. it started in portuguese, then...
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2012-05-25
BuddyBuddy (2000 - 2012)
buddybuddy was the messenger of the south korean pc-cafe and high-school internet through the early 2000s. it launched january 13 2000 from buddy buddy co....
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2012-05-25
aMSN (2002 - 2012)
amsn was an open-source clone of msn messenger that ran everywhere the official client did not, mainly linux and mac. it copied the look and the features...
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2012-05-17
Vector maglog (2006 - 2012)
vector spent the 1990s and 2000s as the place japan went to download software, and in 2006 it built a blog host with a cash register attached. maglog gave you...
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2012-05-15
Ta-da List (2005 - 2012)
ta-da list was 37signals' first free web app, a to-do list you kept in your browser and shared with a link. it launched in january 2005, built on ruby on...
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2012-05-14
Perian (2006 - 2012)
four volunteer developers put a farewell letter on the front page on 14 may 2012 and promised one last release. it never shipped. the download link still...
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2012-05-11
Plazes (2004 - 2012)
a berlin location-aware social before foursquare existed. it sniffed the router's mac address to guess which cafe you were in, then offered to tell twitter and...
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2012-05-10
UpMyStreet (1998 - 2012)
upmystreet let you type a british postcode into a box and get back what living there was actually like: house prices, school results, recorded crime, council...
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2012-05-09
Safari for Windows (2007 - 2012)
safari for windows was steve jobs walking onto the wwdc 2007 stage and announcing that the mac browser was now also a windows browser. it ran on windows xp and...
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2012-05-09
Windows Marketplace for Mobile (2009 - 2012)
windows marketplace for mobile was microsoft's app store for windows mobile 6.x devices. launched 6 october 2009 with 246 apps and a 70/30 developer revenue...
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2012-05-04
Glancee (2010 - 2012)
three thousand daily users and not a dollar of outside funding, and facebook bought the whole thing in may 2012 and switched it off the same week. glancee was...
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2012-05-04
BlinkList (2005 - 2012)
kuala lumpur had a del.icio.us competitor in june 2005 and it was better at several specific things. highlight any text on a page and blinklist filled in the...
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2012-05-01
Microsoft TerraServer (1998 - 2012)
terraserver launched june 24, 1998 as a research-microsoft project led by jim gray and tom barclay, conceived as a public stress test of sql server holding...
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2012-05-01
PostRank (2007 - 2012)
postrank was a social-engagement analytics service that scored blog posts by how much chatter they generated across twitter, digg, facebook, delicious, on-site...
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2012-05-01
AOL Latino (2003 - 2012)
aol latino was the spanish-language portal aol launched on october 1 2003 for the us hispanic audience. the service bundled a localized aol experience with...
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2012-05-01
Motorola Xoom (2011 - 2012)
google's chosen flagship for android 3.0 honeycomb, the first android version built specifically for tablets. 10.1 inch screen, $799 on verizon 3G at launch,...
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2012-05-01
Zoombu (2009 - 2012)
zoombu was a UK door-to-door travel search engine that let you enter a home address and a destination and got back a full multi-modal route: flights, trains,...
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2012-05-01
Openwave (1994 - 2012)
before the iphone there was a browser inside almost every phone that could reach the internet at all, and for most of a decade that browser came from one...
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2012-05-01
Road Runner (1996 - 2012)
time warner cable switched it on in akron in september 1996 and named it after a warner bros cartoon bird, because a bird that outruns everything explained...
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2012-05-01
Gemaga (1984 - 2012)
it started in 1984 as beep, a japanese magazine about games on home computers and arcade machines, with a layout borrowed from a men's fashion title. then it...
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2012-05-01
Zavit Acheret (2005 - 2012)
students in the middle east and africa history department at tel aviv university started it in 2005, on the argument that israeli media showed the arab world...
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2012-04-30
FortuneCity (1997 - 2012)
fortunecity launched in 1997 as the british answer to geocities and angelfire, organized around themed cities you picked for your homepage. richard jones and...
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2012-04-30
Google Wave (2009 - 2012)
Google's attempt at "email if it had been invented today." it was email plus chat plus collaborative document, all merged into one ui. it confused everyone who...
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2012-04-30
Joost (2007 - 2012)
joost was niklas zennström and janus friis's third act, after kazaa and skype: a desktop p2p television client that streamed mtv and viacom-tier shows in...
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2012-04-30
Knol (2008 - 2012)
knol was google's attempt to build wikipedia by paying experts to write under their real names instead of letting strangers edit collaboratively. it launched...
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2012-04-30
Microsoft Office Live Small Business (2007 - 2012)
microsoft office live small business was the free version of office that microsoft handed out to mom-and-pop companies between november 2007 and april 30 2012....
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2012-04-30
Wii no Ma (2009 - 2012)
nintendo and the biggest advertising agency in japan built a television channel inside the wii, and instead of a menu they drew a living room. your family of...
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2012-04-30
Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative (2001 - 2012)
three coworkers started it as a side project in 1996 and there were five people left on it by the time it shipped in 2001. jumpgate asked you to fly a ship...
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2012-04-27
MP3tunes (2005 - 2012)
michael robertson built a legal-in-his-reading music locker in 2005 and spent seven years being sued into liquidation by emi. the locker worked. the storage...
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2012-04-24
Fwix (2008 - 2012)
darian shirazi had been facebook's first intern, and he left to build a news site for every city at once. fwix raised 6.75 million dollars and sold its local...
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2012-04-23
Adobe Flash Catalyst (2010 - 2012)
adobe took an illustrator artboard and turned it into a flex prototype the developer could use. that was the pitch. it shipped in cs5 in april 2010 as the...
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2012-04-23
Adobe Device Central (2007 - 2012)
device central was the window in creative suite where you found out how your work looked on a phone. it carried profiles for hundreds of handsets, their screen...
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2012-04-23
Adobe OnLocation (2007 - 2012)
tapeless cameras killed this one, and adobe wrote the cause of death into its own end-of-life notice: the industry had moved to native, card-based workflows...
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2012-04-20
Google One Pass (2011 - 2012)
apple announced app store subscriptions on 15 february 2011 and kept thirty percent. the next morning eric schmidt stood up at humboldt university in berlin...
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2012-04-19
Picnik (2007 - 2012)
the in-browser flash photo editor that opened any jpeg in fifteen seconds and let you crop, color-correct, add a faux-polaroid frame, and save it back. flickr...
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2012-04-19
Is Anyone Up? (2010 - 2012)
is anyone up ran for about eighteen months on one cruel format. somebody submitted a naked photograph of a person they knew, and the site published it next to...
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2012-04-18
LibertySurf (1999 - 2012)
an internet account that cost nothing to open, because the money came off your phone bill instead. kingfisher and bernard arnault's internet holding put around...
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2012-04-18
2xMoinsCher (2001 - 2012)
a french marketplace for used goods that solved the trust problem with a bank account instead of a reputation score. you paid the site rather than the...
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2012-04-15
BlogScope (2005 - 2012)
fifty-seven million blogs and 1.3 billion posts sat on four sun servers in a computer science department in toronto. blogscope searched them and then showed...
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2012-04-13
EA Sports MMA (2010 - 2012)
dana white told fighters that anyone who did business with ea would not be in the ufc, and that threat shaped this game before a single copy shipped. ea sports...
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2012-04-10
Qore (2008 - 2012)
from june 2008 sony sold a monthly video magazine on the north american playstation store, made by future publishing and hosted by veronica belmont and audrey...
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2012-04-05
Buzz Out Loud (2005 - 2012)
tom merritt and molly wood promised five or so minutes of tech news every second day when they started in march 2005. it became forty minutes every weekday...
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2012-04-04
WeiweiCam (2012 - 2012)
forty six hours is the entire run. ai weiwei installed four webcams in his beijing house on the first anniversary of his detention, aimed one of them at his...
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2012-04-03
Nature Precedings (2007 - 2012)
in june 2007 nature publishing group opened a place where biologists could post work before anyone had reviewed it. physics had had exactly that since 1991,...
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2012-04-02
Girls Around Me (2011 - 2012)
girls around me was a russian ios app that pulled foursquare check-ins and facebook profiles into a live map of women in your immediate area. it did nothing...
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2012-04-02
htmlGEAR (2000 - 2012)
lycos launched htmlgear in may 2000 as five free widgets you could paste into any page on any host, and the guestbook is the one that mattered. it gave a...
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2012-04-01
Brightkite (2007 - 2012)
brightkite was the second wave of check-in apps, the one that came after dodgeball and before foursquare won. you texted your location, the app showed you...
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2012-04-01
FileServe (2010 - 2012)
fileserve was one of a dozen one-click hosters that all looked the same, a countdown timer and a premium wall standing between you and a file. it paid people...
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2012-04-01
Wupload (2011 - 2012)
a file host that paid you to fill it. forty dollars for every thousand downloads, no questions asked about the file. that reward economy built the cyberlocker...
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2012-04-01
Cramster (2003 - 2012)
cramster sold the answers. not the odd-numbered ones printed in the back of the book, all of them, worked through step by step, for a monthly fee. it started...
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2012-04-01
Revolution Health (2005 - 2012)
steve case put more than two hundred million dollars of his own money and his friends' money into a free health website meant to take webmd's audience away...
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2012-04-01
The Farmer's Market (2006 - 2012)
the farmer's market sold drugs online for six years before bitcoin was a usable currency, which meant every order it filled left a receipt somewhere. it began...
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2012-04-01
Shareware.com (1995 - 2012)
a civil engineering professor at the university of ljubljana built an index of every shareware archive he could reach, and it got popular enough to overload...
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2012-04-01
Writeboard (2005 - 2012)
chicago, october 2005: 37signals shipped a writing tool with no signup screen. you set a password and mailed the url to whoever needed to read it, and every...
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2012-04-01
zSHARE (2005 - 2012)
on january 19, 2012 the us government seized megaupload, and for about two weeks every other cyberlocker on the internet looked like the winner. zshare was one...
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2012-04-01
Sanyo (1947 - 2012)
1947, osaka. toshio iue borrowed a disused matsushita plant from his brother-in-law and started building bicycle lamps. by 2003 the company was turning over...
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2012-04-01
Sepia Mutiny (2004 - 2012)
from july 2004 to april 2012 a rotating group of second-generation south asian americans ran the loudest desi group blog on the english-language web, writing...
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2012-03-31
Brizzly (2009 - 2012)
brizzly was the web-based twitter client built by the google reader team after they left google. AOL bought the parent company thing labs in 2010 for around...
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2012-03-31
Personal Digital Cellular (1993 - 2012)
japan wrote its own 2g standard in april 1991 and switched it on in march 1993, and at its height it carried nearly eighty million people. the radio design...
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2012-03-31
SimpleGeo (2009 - 2012)
ten million dollars in, three and a half million dollars out, and the product gone within five months of the signature. simplegeo sold developers a hosted...
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2012-03-30
少年タケシ (1998 - 2012)
for thirteen and a half years a japanese television network published free flash comics on its own corporate website, three times a week without missing. it...
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2012-03-29
EverQuest Online Adventures (2003 - 2012)
everquest online adventures was the playstation 2 mmo that did not need a hard drive. sony online entertainment launched it on 11 february 2003 to give console...
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2012-03-29
Infantry Online (1999 - 2012)
infantry online was a top-down team shooter drawn in sprites, split into dozens of separate zones that each played by their own rules. harmless games built it...
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2012-03-29
Cosmic Rift (2001 - 2012)
cosmic rift was sony's top-down two-dimensional space shooter, built by jeff petersen, who had written subspace at virgin interactive four years earlier. it...
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2012-03-29
Zipper Interactive (1995 - 2012)
sony closed it on 29 march 2012 and gave the reason as resource re-alignment, which is a phrase that means a spreadsheet. the redmond studio had spent its...
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2012-03-28
Urchin (1998 - 2012)
two people running a small san diego hosting company in the late nineties needed to bill customers by bandwidth, so one of them wrote a program to add up the...
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2012-03-27
BNET (2007 - 2012)
march 2012 is when the masthead changed. cnet networks had launched bnet in 2007 as a trade magazine for people who manage other people, and for about a year...
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2012-03-13
Encyclopædia Britannica (print) (1768 - 2012)
the english-speaking world's reference set for two and a half centuries. first fascicle published in edinburgh in 1768. the 2010 fifteenth-edition set, 32...
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2012-03-12
Togetherville (2008 - 2012)
togetherville was a social network for kids under 13 with the parent acting as gatekeeper. disney bought it in february 2011 and shelved it about a year later....
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2012-03-12
Nokia Money (2009 - 2012)
nokia money was nokia's mobile-payments push into unbanked emerging markets, launched in india in august 2009 as a partnership with obopay (nokia was obopay's...
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2012-03-11
Gowalla (2007 - 2012)
gowalla was the foursquare alternative for people who cared about how their check-in app looked. illustrated passport pages with custom badges drawn by a real...
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2012-03-06
Slide.com (2005 - 2012)
slide built slideshow widgets and superpoke for myspace and facebook profiles. google bought it in 2010 for $182m and closed it a year later. the widgets had...
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2012-03-03
Continental Airlines (1934 - 2012)
on paper continental is the airline that survived. the merged company kept its operating certificate and its legal incorporation, then painted united's name on...
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2012-03-01
Google Friend Connect (2008 - 2012)
google friend connect was google's pre-google-plus attempt to put a portable social layer on any website. you copied a snippet of javascript into your page,...
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2012-03-01
Opera Unite (2009 - 2012)
opera unite was your browser as a webserver. you opened opera and flipped a switch, then other people could connect to your laptop to download a file or read a...
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2012-03-01
coComment (2006 - 2012)
cocomment was a bookmarklet plus a hosted dashboard. you commented on any blog or news site, it logged the thread, then it pinged you when someone replied...
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2012-03-01
Clipmarks (2005 - 2012)
clipmarks was a new york tool from 2005 that let you clip a piece of a web page, a paragraph or a photo, and keep or share just that, years before evernote's...
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2012-03-01
Hudson Soft (1973 - 2012)
hudson started as an amateur radio shop in sapporo in 1973, run by two brothers who named it after a steam locomotive. it became the first company nintendo...
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2012-03-01
Ecast (1999 - 2012)
a san francisco company that connected the jukebox in the corner of the bar to a broadband network, so the machine could pull any track in a central catalog...
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2012-03-01
Solvate (2009 - 2012)
$6.3 million went into a freelance marketplace that lasted about thirty months. solvate launched in 2009 out of new york with a model that sat between a job...
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2012-03-01
Bluu (2009 - 2012)
one man in hungary spent three years writing his own web index because the search engines of the day were not much help with his work. bluu opened to the...
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2012-03
CiaoWeb (1999 - 2012)
a car company decided italy needed its own yahoo and put two hundred billion lire behind the idea. the portal launched eight days before the millennium and...
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2012-02-29
Rotten.com (1996 - 2012)
the original 1996 shock site. it ran for sixteen years from a single-word domain that soylent communications grabbed with a script. the final post landed in...
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2012-02-22
Betavine (2007 - 2012)
vodafone built a developer community and vodafone quietly absorbed it. betavine launched in 2007 out of the group's research arm, hosted alpha and beta mobile...
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2012-02-21
Scroogle (2003 - 2012)
scroogle sat between you and google. it ran your search from its own servers and handed the results back on a plain page with the ads taken out, setting no...
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2012-02-20
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition (2011 - 2012)
one hundred and forty six days is the entire shelf life of a zelda game. nintendo put four swords anniversary edition on dsiware at a price of zero for the...
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2012-02-17
Be-Bratz.com (2007 - 2012)
the login was a plastic necklace. mga entertainment shipped it inside three bratz dolls at $29.99 in august 2007, and plugging it into a usb port was the only...
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2012-02-16
Sony Ericsson (2001 - 2012)
sony ericsson had its turkish moment around 2005-2008. the k750i with the sliding lens cover was the phone people put on the table at the cafe; the w800i was...
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2012-02-15
Library.nu (2004 - 2012)
library.nu was the academic wing of file sharing, four hundred thousand books deep, most of them priced for a university library budget rather than for a...
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2012-02-15
TeachStreet (2008 - 2012)
seattle, april 2008: dave schappell opened a site where you could find a local class and where the person teaching it could run their listings without owning a...
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2012-02-11
Moxi DVR (2000 - 2012)
kirkland, washington, 1999: paul allen started a set-top company, and down in palo alto steve perlman started another one in secret. digeo bought moxi digital...
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2012-02-09
Earthrise (2011 - 2012)
4 february 2011 to 9 february 2012. masthead studios in sofia spent years on a skill-based post-apocalyptic mmo with open pvp and a player-run economy, put it...
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2012-02-09
Kodak EasyShare (2001 - 2012)
chapter 11 on 19 january 2012, and three weeks later kodak announced it was leaving the camera business entirely. easyshare had started in 2001 with the dx3600...
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2012-02-07
iLike (2006 - 2012)
hadi and ali partovi launch a music recommendation app in october 2006 with an itunes sidebar that suggests songs based on what you played. they port it to...
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2012-02-06
BTjunkie (2005 - 2012)
btjunkie was a top-five torrent search engine through most of the late 2000s, with a clean index, an active community, and a single anonymous operator who...
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2012-02-03
Malév Hungarian Airlines (1946 - 2012)
budapest woke up on 3 february 2012 without a flag carrier. four weeks earlier the european commission had ruled that every rescue hungary pushed into malev...
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2012-02-01
Cybertown (1995 - 2012)
cybertown was the 3d web before the 3d web stopped being a serious idea. you installed a vrml plugin, you logged into colony city, and a chunky 3d avatar...
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2012-02-01
TwitterPeek (2009 - 2012)
peek inc launched the original email-only peek in 2008 to surprisingly warm reviews. the twitterpeek arrived in november 2009 at 100 dollars with six months of...
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2012-02-01
Peek (2008 - 2012)
peek was a small orange handheld that only did email. it cost 99 dollars on an at&t data plan and won time magazine's gadget of the year in 2008. the company...
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2012-02-01
Muxlim (2006 - 2012)
muxlim was a muslim lifestyle social network built in helsinki, aimed mostly at muslims living as a minority in the west. it claimed users across around 190...
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2012-02-01
Multiupload (2009 - 2012)
multiupload took one file off your disk and pushed it to a row of cyberlockers at the same time, then handed back a single page listing every copy, so a forum...
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2012-02-01
Neogen.ro (2000 - 2012)
romania got a home-grown social network and kept it for a decade. neogen ran out of târgu mureș, absorbed the country's school-reunion site and its dating...
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2012-02-01
Truveo (2005 - 2012)
truveo built a crawler that could see video the ordinary web spiders walked straight past, which in 2005 was a real problem worth fifty million dollars to aol....
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2012-02-01
CoTweet (2008 - 2012)
in 2008 "running the company twitter account" was a job that had just been invented and had no tooling behind it. cotweet built the tooling: one dashboard for...
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2012-02-01
E24.se (2005 - 2012)
svenska dagbladet and aftonbladet were rivals who happened to share an owner, and in october 2005 schibsted had them staff a business news site together. it...
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2012-02-01
QuickSilverScreen (2004 - 2012)
the megaupload raid landed on 19 january 2012, and quicksilverscreen was not named in it. that did not matter. the site had passed through several owners by...
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2012-02-01
alpha.gov.uk (2011 - 2012)
twelve weeks and 261 thousand pounds bought the british government a working prototype of one website in place of hundreds. it took more than 100,000 visits,...
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2012-01-31
LEGO Universe (2010 - 2012)
lego universe was lego group's subscription mmo for nine to twelve year olds, developed by netdevil and shipped on october 26, 2010. by november 2011 it had...
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2012-01-31
Splinder (2001 - 2012)
italian internet had its own blogging layer for a decade. splinder was the place where people who wrote in italian put their posts before wordpress.com...
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2012-01-31
Pageflakes (2005 - 2012)
pageflakes opened in late 2005 as an ajax personal start page where each widget was called a flake. it sat in the same category as netvibes and igoogle....
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2012-01-27
Meteor Games (2007 - 2012)
adam and donna powell sold neopets to viacom for $160 million in 2005 and started meteor games two years later in beverly hills, with ninety or so people and a...
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2012-01-23
BlogPulse (2004 - 2012)
blogpulse was an automated blog search engine and trend analytics service built by intelliseek around 2004, acquired by nielsen buzzmetrics in 2006 and folded...
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2012-01-22
FileSonic (2010 - 2012)
a top-ten cyberlocker that pulled its own teeth on 22 january 2012, the weekend the megaupload founders got arrested in new zealand. users could still pull...
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2012-01-22
Plancast (2009 - 2012)
a social network pointed at the future instead of the past: you posted plans you meant to keep and friends said they were in. a small tech-early-adopter crowd...
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2012-01-19
Megaupload (2005 - 2012)
the cyberlocker that put a file behind a single download link, charged for premium speed, paid uploaders for popular files, and swallowed the global piracy...
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2012-01-18
Amaya (1996 - 2012)
the w3c built its own browser and made it an editor too, because the first browser tim berners-lee wrote had been one and the web had quietly lost that. amaya...
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2012-01-16
LEGO Design byME (2005 - 2012)
lego let you design your own set in a free cad program, upload it, put your own picture on the box, and receive the exact bricks in the mail. it ran for seven...
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2012-01-15
Jaiku (2006 - 2012)
jaiku launched a month before twitter, did the same thing with more features, sold to google in october 2007, then sat inside google for four years not getting...
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2012-01-15
Google Code Search (2006 - 2012)
russ cox built the engine underneath it, a trigram index feeding a regular expression matcher that could not be made to hang, and google put it in labs on 5...
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2012-01-15
National Biological Information Infrastructure (1994 - 2012)
a 1993 national research council report asked for one front door to everything the united states knew about its own living things. the door got built and then...
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2012-01-12
Crazyracing AirRider (2009 - 2012)
nexon opened the beta on 21 july 2009 and shipped its last update three months after that. the flying sequel to kartrider then sat on live servers, unpatched,...
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2012-01-09
Fallout Online (2007 - 2012)
$5,750,000 bought bethesda the fallout intellectual property in april 2007, and the one thing it did not buy was the right to turn the series into an mmo....
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2012-01-05
Word Count Journal (2007 - 2012)
one word on your first day and two on your second gets you to 66,795 by the end of a non-leap year, more words than most novels, and that arithmetic was the...
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2012-01-05
Scitopia (2007 - 2012)
twenty-one learned societies agreed to let one search box look inside all of their libraries at once, which took more diplomacy than engineering. the box went...
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2012-01-04
Trident Microsystems (1987 - 2012)
a cheap pc in 1994 came with a graphics chip nobody had asked for, and more often than not the writing on it said trident. the company sold slow svga parts at...
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2012-01-02
HiGear (2011 - 2012)
four cars, taken by a criminal ring with stolen identities and stolen credit cards, ended a company six months after it launched. higear rented out other...
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2012-01-01
Microsoft SPOT Watch (2004 - 2012)
the spot watch was microsoft's first try at a smartwatch, four years before the iphone existed and almost a decade before the apple watch. bill gates announced...
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2012-01-01
Sony Bloggie (2008 - 2012)
the bloggie was sony's pocket-camcorder answer to the flip video, launched as the webbie hd in 2008 and rebranded at ces 2010. the line had three years of...
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2012-01-01
Google Health (2008 - 2012)
google health let you store medical records in a google account and share them with hospitals or pharmacies that had api hooks. it ran from '08 to '12 and...
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2012-01-01
Modern Tales (2002 - 2012)
modern tales was the webcomics subscription joey manley launched on march 2 2002 with a roster of around 30 professional cartoonists. the pricing was $2.95 a...
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2012-01-01
Babelgum (2007 - 2012)
babelgum was a 2007 italian internet tv platform funded by silvio scaglia, who put around fifty million euros of his own money into the project. it ran on a...
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2012-01-01
Imbee (2007 - 2012)
imbee was the chaperoned-sn experiment for kids 8 to 14, built so parents could approve every connection. january 2008 it settled a 130,000 dollar federal...
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2012-01-01
Jamba! / Jamster (2000 - 2012)
jamba (jamster in the english-speaking markets) was the berlin ringtone company that turned crazy frog into a billboard-charting single in 2005 and hooked...
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2012-01-01
O2 Active (2002 - 2012)
o2 active was the mobile portal that o2 uk (plus ireland germany and the netherlands) put on the front page of every wap-capable phone from 2002 to about 2012....
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2012-01-01
Orange World (2003 - 2012)
orange world was france telecom's carrier portal, launched october 2003 as a revamped wap homepage for orange-branded handsets across france the uk poland...
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2012-01-01
MSN Direct (2004 - 2012)
msn direct was microsoft's attempt at ambient wireless data over the fm radio band. bill gates announced it at comdex 2002 and hardware shipped in 2004....
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2012-01-01
Ecademy (1998 - 2012)
the uk's first social network for business, built by penny and thomas power in 1998, four years ahead of linkedin. it ran as a paid membership club and grew a...
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2012-01-01
Guruji.com (2006 - 2012)
guruji.com was an indian search engine built to understand india better than google did, funded by sequoia and sandstone and started by two iit delhi graduates...
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2012-01-01
Vitaminic (1999 - 2012)
vitaminic tried to build a legal music download business in europe while the rest of us were downloading music for free. founded in italy in 1999, it let...
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2012-01-01
S3 Graphics (1989 - 2012)
s3 spent the mid-1990s as the graphics chip almost nobody chose, because it came in whatever machine the shop had put together. by 1996 it held about half the...
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2012-01-01
Kangurum (2000 - 2012)
migros started selling groceries over the web in 1997, and by 2000 decided the thing to be was a mall rather than a shop. kangurum opened on 24 february that...
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2012-01-01
MeBeam (2007 - 2012)
ashod apakian put mebeam up in november 2007 and the whole product was one idea: a video chat room that existed as soon as you typed a name after the slash. no...
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2012-01-01
Akella (1995 - 2012)
akella was a moscow publisher named after the wolf that leads the pack in kipling's jungle book, founded in 1995 and grown into five development teams with a...
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2012-01-01
YouHaveDownloaded (2011 - 2012)
three developers put a site online in december 2011 that did one thing. you gave it an ip address and it told you which torrents that address had been seen...
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2012-01-01
Aport (1997 - 2012)
before yandex won, russia had three serious search engines and aport was one of them. it came out of a software company called agama, launched properly in...
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2012-01-01
FindArticles (2000 - 2012)
a joint venture between looksmart's search technology and the gale group's licensed archive, put online in 2000 and free to read. by 2007 it reached around...
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2012-01-01
New.net (2001 - 2012)
new.net sold names in about two dozen top level domains that icann had never approved, .shop and .mp3 among them. the catch was that nobody could reach those...
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2012-01-01
Trexy (2006 - 2012)
a london browser plugin that sat on top of more than 3,000 search engines and recorded where your searching actually went, built from early 2006 by the...
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2012-01-01
Myartspace (2006 - 2012)
an online gallery and social network for working artists, incorporated by catherine mccormack-skiba in 2005 and opened to the public in may 2006. it gave an...
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2012-01-01
Rollyo (2005 - 2012)
rollyo let you name up to twenty five sites you trusted and search only those, which in 2005 read as the correction the web needed. dave pell built it on top...
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2012-01-01
Azbuz (2006 - 2012)
doğan online and a small development shop called over team put it up in may 2006. you signed up and got a free page at your-name.azbuz.com with a photo album...
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2012-01-01
Stanza (2008 - 2012)
stanza was on the app store before amazon's own reader was, it read every format that mattered including the ones amazon did not sell, and it pulled books...
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2012-01-01
ScientificMatch.com (2007 - 2012)
nineteen hundred and ninety five dollars, and a cotton swab in the post. eric holzle was a mechanical engineer who had read the immune-gene attraction...
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2012-01-01
Cinematical (2005 - 2012)
april 2011 emptied the masthead. the editor in chief resigned on the 5th and the freelance budget went the day after. aol kept the brand up anyway: the front...
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2012-01-01
kgb 542542 (2009 - 2012)
on 5 january 2009 a short code opened in the united states where ninety-nine cents bought you a written answer to any question you could fit in a text message....
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2012-01-01
AOL Seed (2009 - 2012)
five hundred freelancers interviewed roughly two thousand bands at south by southwest in march 2010, and that was seed doing exactly what it had been built to...
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2012-01-01
Trunk.ly (2010 - 2012)
avos systems bought trunk.ly on 9 november 2011 and gave it two months to die. the australian service had spent its whole run doing the thing delicious never...
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2012-01-01
Trackle (2009 - 2012)
two healtheon veterans in sunnyvale took money from nea in 2008 and built standing alerts for the web: tracklets, saved agents that watched a craigslist...
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2012-01-01
ffdshow (2002 - 2012)
in may 2002 milan cutka published a decoder that sat underneath whatever player you already had. ffdshow played nothing itself. it registered with windows, and...
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2012-01-01
NoseRub (2007 - 2012)
a german developer named dirk olbertz spent five years writing a federated social network in php and mysql, released it under the mit license, and got it as...
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2012-01-01
sones GraphDB (2010 - 2012)
a tranche from the second funding round never arrived, and that was the whole story. the managing directors filed at the leipzig district court for impending...
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2012-01-01
Yebol (2009 - 2012)
hongfeng yin left yahoo with the idea that a search result should look like a homepage for its subject rather than a list of ten links, and yebol opened its...
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2012-01-01
SoftHome (1996 - 2012)
you will not have to change your address ever again, not even when you change isps. that sentence sat in softhome.net's page description from 1996 onward and...
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2012
Pravkniga.ru (2006 - 2012)
two moscow publishing houses spent six years building a bibliography nobody was paying them to build: every orthodox book printed in russia across two...
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2011-12-31
Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint (2002 - 2011)
microsoft producer was a free add-in for powerpoint that let you capture webcam video alongside microphone narration synced to slide timings, then publish the...
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2011-12-31
Microsoft Tablet PC (2002 - 2011)
bill gates demoed the tablet pc concept at fall comdex in november 2001 as a stylus-driven windows laptop. windows xp tablet pc edition shipped on november 7...
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2011-12-31
Jaman (2006 - 2011)
jaman was a proto-netflix for foreign films. gaurav dhillon, fresh off co-founding informatica, put together a curated catalog of independent and international...
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2011-12-31
Kerio Personal Firewall (2002 - 2011)
kerio personal firewall was the small czech program that sat in the windows tray and asked whether the executable it had just caught was allowed to reach the...
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2011-12-31
Vodafone 360 (2009 - 2011)
in 2009 vodafone decided the phone book should belong to the network. 360 pulled your contacts out of facebook and windows live into a single list on the...
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2011-12-31
ExerciseTV (2006 - 2011)
comcast and the trainer jake steinfeld built a fitness channel that lived inside the video on demand menu of an american cable box. the workouts were free if...
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2011-12-31
MusicStation (2007 - 2011)
£1.99 a week on your phone bill bought unlimited music downloaded straight onto an ordinary handset over the mobile network, with no computer and no cable...
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2011-12-31
SteekR (2007 - 2011)
bordeaux, 2002: three founders spent the first two years on research and then built the business around telecom operators, who put their own brand names on it....
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2011-12-30
Beyond Oblivion (2008 - 2011)
eighty seven million dollars, on the press numbers, went into a cloud music service called boinc that nobody outside the company ever used. the plan was to...
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2011-12-28
PostSecret App (2011 - 2011)
two million secrets came through it in under four months, and roughly one in a hundred of them was something a volunteer moderator had to delete at four in the...
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2011-12-27
AOL Video (2006 - 2011)
two acquisitions and a television library went into this thing and none of them saved it. aol bought truveo in january 2006 for the crawler and had already...
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2011-12-21
280 Slides (2008 - 2011)
motorola paid twenty million dollars in august 2010 for three people who had rebuilt apple's cocoa framework in javascript, and the presentation app was only...
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2011-12-20
Apture (2007 - 2011)
three founders built a layer that sat above a publisher's page, so that a link could open a video or a definition without taking you anywhere else. the...
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2011-12-19
Saab Automobile (1945 - 2011)
general motors owned the intellectual property underneath the cars and would not let it cross to a chinese buyer, which is the short version of why trollhättan...
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2011-12-19
Russian Trading System (1995 - 2011)
moscow ran two stock exchanges against each other for sixteen years, one quoting in rubles and one quoting in dollars. on 19 december 2011 the opening bell...
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2011-12-15
Beluga (2010 - 2011)
beluga was a december 2010 ex-googler side project that became the codebase facebook used to launch facebook messenger eight months later. lucy zhang, ben...
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2011-12-15
Google Buzz (2010 - 2011)
google's first attempt at a social network. launched inside gmail in february 2010. it auto-followed the people you emailed most, and made that follow list...
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2011-12-15
Star Wars Galaxies (2003 - 2011)
star wars galaxies launched june 26, 2003. it was developed by sony online entertainment and published by lucasarts. the original pre-cu game had a deep skill...
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2011-12-15
Thoora (2009 - 2011)
two years of private beta bought thoora thirteen weeks of public life. the toronto company unveiled a real-time news discovery service at techcrunch50 in...
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2011-12-14
BOLT Browser (2009 - 2011)
a mobile browser built by a font company. bolt did not render pages on your handset, it rendered them on bitstream's servers and sent down a compressed version...
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2011-12-08
Logic Express (2004 - 2011)
the mac app store killed this one with a price. logic express existed because logic pro cost $499 in a box and garageband came free with the mac, and apple...
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2011-12-07
Blogsome (2004 - 2011)
blogsome gave away hosted wordpress blogs on yourname.blogsome.com from 2004, which was a year before wordpress.com opened, and its front page was a joke...
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2011-12-07
Ecocho (2008 - 2011)
eight days after launch, google terminated the account that paid for the trees. ecocho had promised two of them for every thousand searches, which is exactly...
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2011-12-05
GamePro (print) (1989 - 2011)
the other big multi-platform us gaming print magazine of the genesis-snes generation. first issue april 1989, founded by patrick ferrell and leeanne mcdermott...
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2011-12-05
Google Sidewiki (2009 - 2011)
google sidewiki launched on 23 september 2009 as a browser-toolbar feature that opened a sidebar next to any web page and let visitors leave comments on that...
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2011-12-01
Snaptu (2007 - 2011)
snaptu was a free app platform for feature phones, the cheap handsets that could not run real apps of their own. the trick was that the apps did not run on the...
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2011-12-01
Beatnik (1993 - 2011)
thomas dolby founded headspace in 1993 because there was no decent way to put sound on a screen that was not a cd. what came out of it was rmf, a format that...
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2011-12-01
Afrigator (2007 - 2011)
afrigator was a directory and a traffic ranking for the african blogosphere, built in johannesburg in april 2007 and majority-bought by naspers eighteen months...
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2011-12-01
360networks (1998 - 2011)
a canadian construction family worked out that the hard part of building a fiber network was not the fiber, it was permission to dig. so they made a deal with...
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2011-12-01
StyleFeeder (2005 - 2011)
philip jacob started it in january 2005 out of a consultancy in the boston area and opened it to the public on 16 october that year. stylefeeder let you clip a...
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2011-12-01
PocoMail (1999 - 2011)
shareware was a business model before it became a memory, and this was one of the last ones that worked. pocomail shipped in 1999 out of poco systems as a...
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2011-12-01
Teleplace (2007 - 2011)
alan kay's croquet research went commercial in 2007, when a palo alto startup called qwaq shipped it as an office you walked around in instead of dialing into....
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2011-12-01
SecFinex (2000 - 2011)
nyse euronext closed secfinex in december 2011 while saying it still believed central counterparty clearing would matter in stock lending one day. the london...
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2011-11-30
JooJoo (2009 - 2011)
joojoo was the tablet that came out of the crunchpad implosion. michael arrington had pitched a $200 web tablet on techcrunch in 2008. his hardware partner...
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2011-11-30
Upoc (1999 - 2011)
in 1999 four people in new york built a way to text a group instead of a person. the groups that formed were fan clubs and celebrity-sighting networks rather...
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2011-11-28
TGcom (2001 - 2011)
mediaset's news website, live from 8 march 2001 and run for its last eight years by paolo liguori. it never had a print edition and it was never only a...
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2011-11-25
Critical Metrics (2007 - 2011)
joey anuff co-founded suck.com in 1995 and then spent 2007 building the opposite of a popularity contest. critical metrics read over 150 music publications,...
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2011-11-21
Yahoo! Site Explorer (2005 - 2011)
site explorer was the public window into yahoo's web index. for any url you typed in, you got the list of pages on that domain plus the list of backlinks...
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2011-11-18
AnyHub (2009 - 2011)
a student in melbourne ran a file host that was holding 1,122,585 files and 2.81 terabytes on the day he announced it was closing, 18 november 2011. anyhub...
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2011-11-17
Webplanet (2001 - 2011)
denis kryuchkov left the paper he founded in 2006 and built habrahabr. his deputy editor yuri sinodov left in 2007 and built roem.ru. both of the russian tech...
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2011-11-16
Apache Harmony (2005 - 2011)
an apache project that rebuilt java from scratch under a license anybody could use, and then could not get hold of the test suite that would have let it call...
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2011-11-16
The Minnesota Independent (2006 - 2011)
a letter from david bennahum on 16 november 2011 told minnesota readers that the network funding their statehouse newsroom would be publishing out of one...
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2011-11-15
Adobe Flex SDK (2004 - 2011)
flex was macromedia's rich internet application framework, an xml dialect called mxml that compiled into a flash swf with actionscript behind it. adobe...
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2011-11-13
Anonplus (2011 - 2012)
anonplus was the social network that anonymous announced after google+ banned their accounts. it lasted about three weeks as a public site before two separate...
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2011-11-09
Logitech Revue (2010 - 2011)
logitech bet on a set-top box that would put the open web on the living-room tv. the open web's tv networks decided no. by the time the revue dropped from 299...
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2011-11-03
WooMe (2007 - 2011)
woome launched on stage at the first techcrunch40 in september 2007 with a clean idea: speed dating, but the sessions run in your browser over webcam. european...
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2011-11-02
BuyWithMe (2009 - 2011)
buywithme ran the groupon mechanic seven months behind groupon: one discount a day in one city, unlocked once enough people bought in. it raised thirty million...
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2011-11-01
DoylesRoom (2004 - 2011)
an online poker room that rented doyle brunson's name from 2004 and then spent seven years being evicted from one network to the next as each of them in turn...
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2011-11-01
Geomium (2010 - 2011)
london, september 2010. ben dowling and michael fergusson launched an iphone app that refused the thing everyone else in location was doing: no badges and no...
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2011-11-01
It Died (2008 - 2011)
glenn fleishman spent fifteen months writing down the closing dates of other people's web services, then stopped in february 2010 and let the registration go...
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2011-11-01
Threadsy (2009 - 2011)
rob goldman's pitch at techcrunch50 in september 2009 was that your messages should arrive in one place regardless of which company carried them. two years...
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2011-10-31
Minna no Theater Wii (2009 - 2011)
fujitsu software built a video rental shop and shipped it as a wiiware channel, which made it the first video-on-demand service the wii ever carried in japan....
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2011-10-28
SeeSaw (2010 - 2011)
seesaw was assembled out of the parts of project kangaroo, the joint catch-up service bbc worldwide and channel 4 had been building with itv until the...
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2011-10-20
Apple iDVD (2001 - 2011)
idvd was the consumer half of apple's optical-drive era. you imported imovie footage and picked one of the painfully designed motion-menu themes to spit out a...
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2011-10-15
MySpace China (2007 - 2011)
myspace china, known locally as 聚友网, was news corp's attempt to plant myspace in the one market it most wanted and least understood. it launched in april 2007...
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2011-10-14
Like.com (2006 - 2011)
like.com was riya's computer vision pointed at shopping instead of at faces. you gave it a picture of a handbag and it gave you back other handbags with the...
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2011-10-14
Weardrobe (2008 - 2011)
suzanne xie and rich tong worked out in 2004 that there was no software for organizing your own clothes, and four years later they had a community of fashion...
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2011-10-10
Qwikster (2011 - 2011)
netflix split its dvd-by-mail business out under a new name on september 18, 2011, gave it a separate website and a separate bill, and announced it in a blog...
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2011-10-10
MXTabs (1999 - 2011)
mxtabs started as a hobby drum tablature page in 1999 and grew into an archive of more than 150,000 user-written tabs. in december 2005 the music publishers...
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2011-10-05
Team Bondi (2003 - 2011)
team bondi made one game in seven years and it was good. l.a. noire came out in may 2011 with facial capture nobody had seen before, sold well, and got shown...
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2011-10-03
Global Crossing (1997 - 2011)
founded march 1997 by gary winnick, a former drexel burnham bond trader who decided telecom was the next bond market. global crossing laid roughly 100,000...
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2011-10-03
Yahoo! Days (2006 - 2011)
february 2006: yahoo japan launched the american yahoo 360 under its own roof, then ran a public contest to give it a japanese name and came out of it with...
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2011-10-03
Autonomy Corporation (1996 - 2011)
cambridge, june 1996: two people and a piece of bayesian inference wrapped into a product that could read documents nobody had bothered to structure. by 2011...
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2011-10-01
Windows Live Gallery (2006 - 2011)
for five years microsoft ran a free shelf of small things you could bolt onto windows and onto messenger. desktop gadgets for the vista sidebar, toolbar...
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2011-09-27
MeeGo (2010 - 2012)
meego was a linux mobile operating system that nokia and intel announced together at mobile world congress on february 15 2010 by merging maemo and moblin into...
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2011-09-26
Sezmi (2007 - 2011)
sezmi was a box that pulled free over-the-air television in through a smart antenna and recorded it onto a terabyte drive, with internet video mixed into the...
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2011-09-23
National Semiconductor (1959 - 2011)
danbury, connecticut, may 1959, which is not where anybody remembers this company being. it moved west and took charlie sporck off fairchild's payroll in 1967....
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2011-09-20
DigiNotar (1998 - 2011)
a dutch notary's office spent thirteen years selling the promise that a website was who it said it was, and ended up holding the certificates behind the login...
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2011-09-18
Borders (1971 - 2011)
borders started as a single used-book shop in ann arbor in 1971 and grew into the world's second-largest bookstore chain over the next thirty years. amazon ran...
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2011-09-16
Google PowerMeter (2009 - 2011)
powermeter drew a line graph of the electricity leaving your fuse box, updated close to real time, on the theory that people shown their own consumption would...
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2011-09-16
Google Image Labeler (2006 - 2011)
a browser game google launched on 31 august 2006, built on the esp game that luis von ahn had designed at carnegie mellon. it put you and an anonymous stranger...
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2011-09-16
PopEater (2008 - 2011)
aol bought the huffington post in march 2011 and arianna huffington got to decide which of the overlapping brands lived. popeater was aol's celebrity desk and...
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2011-09-16
DIY Life (2007 - 2011)
aol paid $315 million for the huffington post in february 2011 and spent the rest of that year deciding which of its own blogs would still exist. diy life was...
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2011-09-15
Map24 (2001 - 2011)
map24 was a european web mapping service run out of germany by mapsolute gmbh from 2001. peak reach of 150 million monthly page views and five million users in...
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2011-09-15
Asda Story (2008 - 2011)
mgame set 15 march 2011 as the closing date and the players would not accept it, so the company kept the servers running with the cash shop switched off, which...
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2011-09-14
Google Desktop (2004 - 2011)
google desktop was google's attempt to index the inside of your computer the way it had already indexed the outside. it shipped in october 2004 as a free...
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2011-09-14
Google Pack (2006 - 2011)
google's curated installer for windows. one download with a single updater managing a dozen free apps that the average new-pc owner needed. announced at ces...
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2011-09-09
EveryDNS (2001 - 2011)
december 2, 2010, ten at night eastern time, is when most people heard the name. everydns had given wikileaks.org its 24 hours and then pulled the record, on...
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2011-09-05
Google Squared (2009 - 2011)
google squared was announced on 12 may 2009, three days before wolfram alpha went live, and landed on google labs that june. you typed a category and it came...
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2011-09-05
Google Sets (2002 - 2011)
2002, and the entire interface was a column of empty boxes. you put honda in one and toyota in the next, pressed the button, and google handed back a list of...
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2011-09-02
Aardvark (2007 - 2011)
aardvark was the search engine that routed your question to whichever friend in your network might actually know the answer. google bought it in february 2010...
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2011-09-02
Black Rock Studio (1998 - 2011)
brighton racing-game studio that started as pixel planet in 1998, became climax brighton under the climax group in 1999, climax racing in 2004, then black rock...
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2011-09-01
Mobsters (Playdom) (2008 - 2011)
mobsters was a click-driven mafia game playdom shipped on myspace in july 2008. the title hit 13.5 million installs across myspace and reached the top of the...
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2011-09-01
Google Fast Flip (2009 - 2011)
fast flip took the front pages of real newspapers and shrank them into images you could riffle through with a click, grouped by topic. google labs showed it...
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2011-09-01
ApexKB (2008 - 2011)
steve perry wrote it while working as a data integration consultant, and shipped it as a php script anybody could install on their own server. jumper was...
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2011-08-31
Sony Qriocity (2010 - 2011)
qriocity was sony's umbrella brand for cloud video and music on ps3 and bravia, launched in the us in april 2010 as video on demand powered by qriocity. music...
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2011-08-31
Zoome (2007 - 2011)
zoome was japan's second-largest video-sharing site through the late 2000s, sitting behind niconico as the smaller alternative with cleaner h.264 uploads. acca...
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2011-08-29
Walmart Music Downloads (2003 - 2011)
eighty-eight cents was the entire pitch. walmart opened its download store in beta in december 2003 and properly on 23 march 2004, selling drm-locked windows...
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2011-08-26
Facebook Deals (2011 - 2011)
facebook announced a local-coupons pilot at its palo alto office on 3 november 2010 and launched a full groupon competitor on 25 april 2011 in five american...
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2011-08-23
Facebook Places (2010 - 2011)
august 2010 was the month facebook decided check-ins were a product. places shipped in the united states with its own tab and a here now list showing who else...
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2011-08-22
Baidu Shuoba (2010 - 2011)
you could not write a word on it without handing baidu a mobile number and a national id that had to match the public security ministry's database. the...
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2011-08-20
Revver (2005 - 2011)
revver invented the youtube deal before youtube did, then lost the audience because the acquirer stopped honoring it. the model was simple: pre-roll and...
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2011-08-19
ウルトラジャンプエッグ (2008 - 2011)
nothing was kept. ultra jump egg put new manga up on the nineteenth of every month from march 2008, ran it through a flash viewer in the browser, and gave...
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2011-08-18
HP TouchPad (2011 - 2011)
hp paid $1.2 billion for palm in 2010 to get into tablets. the touchpad shipped in july 2011 and got discontinued 49 days later. the $99 fire-sale that...
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2011-08-18
webOS (2009 - 2011)
webos was palm's last attempt to compete with iphone and android. it launched in january 2009 with a card-based multitasking model and a gesture area below the...
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2011-08-18
Palm Pre (2009 - 2011)
the palm pre launched on sprint on june 6 2009 as the showpiece for palm's new webos operating system. the slide-out portrait keyboard on a pebble-shape...
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2011-08-17
Jumo (2010 - 2011)
30 november 2010 to 17 august 2011, which is 260 days, and the most famous thing about jumo is who built it rather than anything it did. chris hughes had...
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2011-08-15
Akoha (2008 - 2011)
a montreal company spent three years trying to turn kindness into a scoring system with physical cards in the loop. you bought a deck, did what a card told you...
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2011-08-11
Dell Streak (2010 - 2011)
five inches was the wrong number in 2010 and the right number by 2013, and dell was holding it at the wrong end of that. the streak ran android 1.6 on a screen...
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2011-08-10
Ribbit (2006 - 2011)
ribbit was a silicon valley startup selling voice as a programmable developer feature. british telecom bought it in july 2008 for $105 million on the theory...
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2011-08-10
Blue Tongue Entertainment (1995 - 2011)
blue tongue started in melbourne in 1995 doing web work and moved into games with an australian rules football title that reached number three on the local...
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2011-08-08
Chobots (2008 - 2011)
somebody got hold of a developer login sometime in 2010, the source tree leaked, and within a year the cheating was unfixable. the closing notice said the...
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2011-08-07
Microsoft My Phone (2009 - 2011)
barcelona, 16 february 2009: steve ballmer announced a free service that would copy everything on a windows mobile handset up to a web page you could log into,...
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2011-08-05
Google Dictionary (2009 - 2011)
a dictionary google ran at its own address for about twenty months. it came out of google translate, got a page of its own in december 2009, and was switched...
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2011-08-02
WalletPop (2008 - 2011)
on 1 august 2011 walletpop.com served its own front page for the last time, and by the next morning the domain was answering with a redirect to dailyfinance...
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2011-08-01
Kyte.tv (2006 - 2011)
kyte was a san francisco startup that built a mobile live-video platform when the iphone was still on its first generation. founded in 2006 by daniel graf and...
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2011-08-01
eCRUSH (1999 - 2011)
you registered and typed in the name of somebody you could not say it to in person, and ecrush emailed that person to tell them somebody had listed them,...
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2011-08-01
Zediva (2010 - 2011)
zediva rented movies the way a video store did, except the disc and the machine playing it stayed in a rack in santa clara and only the picture came to you....
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2011-08-01
Baidu Guoxue (2006 - 2011)
140 million characters of classical chinese, spread over more than a hundred thousand pages, put online by a search company on 12 january 2006. baidu guoxue...
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2011-08-01
MyP2P (2005 - 2011)
a registry status line did it: "this domain name has been registered and is on hold", pending the outcome of legal activity. myp2p was a dutch-run schedule...
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2011-07-31
TroopTube (2008 - 2011)
in may 2007 the defense department blocked youtube and myspace on its own networks, then spent a year and a half working out that soldiers still wanted to send...
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2011-07-29
Seattle PostGlobe (2009 - 2011)
the seattle post-intelligencer printed its last paper on 17 march 2009, after 146 years. one of its reporters, kery murakami, put the postglobe up the...
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2011-07-21
Nabaztag (2005 - 2011)
the wifi-connected rabbit. a small white plastic stationary rabbit that sat on your desk. it had moving ears, a glowing belly, a small speaker. it connected to...
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2011-07-20
Apple Cinema Display (1999 - 2011)
the Cinema Display was the external monitor Apple sold to the people who already owned a Power Mac. it started september 1999 as a 22-inch polycarbonate panel,...
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2011-07-20
Apple Front Row (2005 - 2011)
for six years macs had a hidden party trick. press menu on the bundled apple remote and the screen would dim, the whoom animation would play, and a clean...
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2011-07-20
Apple iSync (2003 - 2011)
isync was the mac's answer to a problem that died with the iphone. you plugged in a nokia or a palm or a sony ericsson over bluetooth, hit sync, and your...
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2011-07-20
Google Directory (2000 - 2011)
google's copy of the open directory project, launched in march 2000 and reordered by pagerank rather than left in alphabetical order. sixteen top categories,...
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2011-07-20
Google Image Swirl (2009 - 2011)
a google labs experiment that took an image search and sorted the results by what the pictures actually looked like, then drew the groups as a cluster of...
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2011-07-20
Google Labs (2002 - 2011)
for nine years google kept a public page of things that were not products yet. autocomplete started there in december 2004 as an experiment nobody was obliged...
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2011-07-20
GifBuilder (1996 - 2011)
yves piguet gave it away, which in 1996 was how the good mac utilities tended to arrive. gifbuilder took a stack of images and wrote them out as one animated...
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2011-07-18
Brentano's (1853 - 2011)
a newsstand outside the new york hotel on broadway, opened in 1853 by an austrian immigrant named august brentano. that was the start of it. the bookshop it...
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2011-07-12
Microsoft Office XP (2001 - 2011)
31 may 2001, and the thing microsoft chose to advertise was a paperclip being switched off. office xp was the first version of office that phoned home to...
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2011-07-12
Socialwok (2009 - 2011)
sixteen days of notice, a disabled signup form and a letter that admits the funding ran out and the developers were no longer available. socialwok won a...
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2011-07-12
Web Services Enhancements (2002 - 2011)
microsoft shipped three versions of wse in three years, made none of them compatible with the last, then replaced the whole thing with wcf. the final version...
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2011-07-07
LugRadio (2004 - 2011)
a linux user group in the west midlands started a fortnightly show in february 2004 and ended up running a conference that mark shuttleworth arrived at by...
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2011-07-06
BIGADDA (2007 - 2011)
bigadda was reliance anil dhirubhai ambani group's attempt at building an indian-language orkut competitor. it launched in august 2007 from mumbai under rajesh...
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2011-07-05
BackType (2008 - 2011)
backtype indexed the conversation that happened away from the article, the blog comments and the tweets that linked to a url, and made it searchable by person....
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2011-07-02
Google Real-Time Search (2009 - 2011)
for eighteen months google search had a moving part. you typed a query and a column of tweets scrolled past in real time, updating while you sat there, which...
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2011-07-01
Faves.com (2006 - 2011)
faves was a social bookmarking service that launched as blue dot in june 2006 out of san francisco. mohit srivastava and sumit sen built it around a browser...
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2011-07-01
Egg (1998 - 2011)
egg opened on 11 october 1998 as prudential's attempt at a bank with no branches, and the launch rate was high enough that over six billion pounds of other...
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2011-07-01
Intute (2006 - 2011)
intute was the british academic web, cataloged by hand. eight subject gateways were merged into one service in july 2006, paid for by jisc, and every entry in...
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2011-07-01
netLibrary (1998 - 2011)
netlibrary sold libraries electronic books on the terms libraries already understood: one copy out on loan to one reader, with a clock on it. it raised...
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2011-07-01
FaceCash (2010 - 2011)
sacramento killed this one. the california money transmission act of 2010 pulled mobile payment startups into a licensing regime written for wire-transfer...
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2011-06-30
Final Cut Server (2008 - 2011)
final cut server was apple's media asset management server for post-production shops, descended from the artbox tool apple picked up in the 2006 proximity...
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2011-06-30
Resident Evil Outbreak (2003 - 2011)
europe bought this game with the online half removed, which for something designed around four players in a collapsing city is close to selling an empty box....
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2011-06-30
Apberget (2003 - 2011)
seven kronor bought a picture of a ski slope, fifteen bought a sports car, and the bill arrived on somebody's parents' phone account. that was the business...
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2011-06-30
TeraGrid (2004 - 2011)
eleven american supercomputing centers spent seven years pretending to be one machine. the national science foundation paid roughly a quarter of a billion...
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2011-06-30
VMware Server (2006 - 2011)
in july 2006 vmware took a server product that had cost money since 2001, renamed it and gave it away, because xen was arriving in linux and microsoft had just...
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2011-06-30
Holy Soap (2009 - 2011)
a british broadcaster built a whole separate website for two australian soap operas, ran it for two years and five days, then closed it with a notice posted on...
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2011-06-30
SearchYC (2007 - 2011)
for three and a half years the only way to find an old hacker news thread was a site that y combinator had nothing to do with and would not link to. mike cheng...
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2011-06-22
QuteCom (WengoPhone) (2005 - 2011)
a french voip operator paid for an open source softphone and then gave it away. wengophone shipped on 25 june 2005 under the gpl and spoke plain sip, so you...
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2011-06-21
DVD Studio Pro (2001 - 2011)
apple shipped dvd studio pro in 2001 after buying astarte's dvdirector code in 2000. it was the high-end disc authoring tool for hollywood. apple sold it...
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2011-06-21
Final Cut Studio (1999 - 2011)
for twelve years final cut was the editing suite hollywood used when it was not using avid. final cut pro 7 shipped in 2009 inside the fcs3 bundle at 999...
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2011-06-21
Final Cut Express (2003 - 2011)
$299 bought you most of final cut pro with the professional formats taken back out. for eight years that was the honest middle of apple's video lineup, sitting...
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2011-06-20
Arora (2008 - 2011)
benjamin meyer built a browser out of the demo app that shipped with qt, gave it away under the gpl, and got it running on everything from haiku to os/2 at 1.2...
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2011-06-18
SageTV (2002 - 2011)
sagetv was the enthusiast end of the home-theater pc world in the early-2000s, a paid windows and linux app that ran your tuner card, scheduled recordings off...
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2011-06-14
Watwet (2007 - 2011)
the last thing watwet ever served was a goodbye written twice, once in arabic and once in english, with a jordanian phone number under it. amman had built the...
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2011-06-14
The Psycho Ex-Wife (2007 - 2011)
judge diane gibbons told anthony morelli to take down that website from the bench in a bucks county custody hearing on 6 june 2011, and banned him from naming...
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2011-06-13
Kaos Studios (2006 - 2011)
a free total-conversion mod that swapped the second world war for the gulf turned into a studio with a payroll. thq hired the desert combat team in january...
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2011-06-11
twaud.io (2009 - 2011)
on 11 june 2011 a two-year-old london side project turned off uploads and said users had a couple of months to download their own audio. playback went away...
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2011-06-10
Salon Table Talk (1995 - 2011)
one of the oldest conversation spaces on the web, born the same day salon.com was and modeled on the well. it ran threaded discussion for sixteen years, which...
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2011-06-08
Kino.to (2008 - 2011)
on 8 june 2011 police in four countries knocked on doors within the same hour and the largest german-language streaming site went dark before lunch. dirk...
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2011-06-08
GazoPa (2008 - 2011)
hitachi put a content-based image search engine on the open web in september 2008 and let anyone draw a rough shape into the box to find pictures matching it....
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2011-06-03
StarWars.com Forums (2001 - 2011)
444,520 messages sat in the cantina alone, and the cantina was one board out of roughly 193. lucasfilm opened the official star wars message boards on 9...
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2011-06-01
MySpace (the real one) (2003 - 2011)
the real myspace, before justin timberlake bought it and turned it into a music site. peak 2005 to 2008. your top 8 friends list was a public love letter and a...
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2011-06-01
BarbieGirls.com (2007 - 2011)
barbiegirls.com was mattel's online virtual world for young girls, opened on april 24 2007. three million players signed up in the first two months, which had...
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2011-06-01
Amstrad E-m@iler (2000 - 2011)
alan sugar built a telephone with a screen for people who did not want a computer. it launched in march 2000 at £79.99, below what it cost to build, and made...
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2011-06-01
MyRealBox (1999 - 2011)
novell needed somewhere to run new builds of its netmail mail server against real traffic, so from 1999 it handed out free accounts at myrealbox.com and let...
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2011-06-01
Linux Gazette (1995 - 2011)
john fisk started it in july 1995 and handed it to a publisher a year later, when he left for medical school. the motto he left behind was making linux just a...
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2011-06-01
LeapFish (2008 - 2011)
a thousand dollars bought a merchant the top slot for a keyword, for life, on a search engine that was really three other search engines in a frame. eighty...
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2011-05-31
Football Manager Live (2008 - 2011)
football manager live was the subscription mmo version of the management game, made by sports interactive and published by sega. it dropped up to a thousand...
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2011-05-31
Legends of Zork (2009 - 2011)
legends of zork put the zork license in a browser tab and put a meter on it. you played a traveling salesman recently fired by frobozzco international, walking...
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2011-05-31
Danger, Inc. (1999 - 2011)
danger built a phone that could not think without a server, in 2000, back when that was a strange thing to want. the hiptop shipped in the us as the t-mobile...
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2011-05-31
Luxist (2004 - 2011)
october 2004 to may 2011, mostly one writer, about objects almost nobody reading could afford. aol bought the blog network it lived in, then bought the...
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2011-05-31
Pixetell (2009 - 2011)
ten dollars a month bought a screen recorder that could drop a narrated video of your own desktop inside an email, at a time when the alternative was booking a...
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2011-05-27
Zeebo (2009 - 2011)
a qualcomm-and-tectoy joint idea, ship a game console into brazil and mexico that skipped physical media entirely and downloaded everything over 3g. the games...
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2011-05-26
Google Blog Search (2005 - 2011)
on 26 may 2011 google put the blog search api on a spring cleaning list with a batch of other deprecations, and the service went with it. it had launched in...
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2011-05-24
MyBlogLog (2005 - 2011)
mybloglog was the widget that showed tiny avatars of the last people who had visited your blog, sitting in the sidebar of half the wordpress and typepad sites...
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2011-05-24
batug.com (2001 - 2011)
batug.com was a turkish basketball webzine that covered the nba the way a fanzine covers a band, with a masthead of writers who were not paid and a house style...
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2011-05-23
enTourage eDGe (2010 - 2011)
the entourage edge was a dual screen android device that hinged a 9.7 inch e-ink reader to a 10.1 inch color lcd, so you could read on one side and write on...
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2011-05-20
eComStation (2001 - 2011)
ecomstation was the kind of operating system its users kept alive in defiance of every signal from the market. serenity systems licensed os/2 warp from ibm in...
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2011-05-19
Blippy (2009 - 2011)
a palo alto startup pitched a social feed for purchases, you link a credit card, it posts what you buy for your followers to see. the investors were the usual...
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2011-05-18
Dabble DB (2006 - 2011)
avi bryant and andrew catton ran a smalltalk consulting shop in vancouver and spent a year building a database that anyone could make by pasting in a...
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2011-05-16
Nokia Ovi (2007 - 2011)
ovi was nokia's services umbrella, announced in london on 29 august 2007 as the door (ovi means door in finnish) to a brand that would sit above symbian and...
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2011-05-16
Slashfood (2005 - 2011)
the slashfood editor signed off at 4:21 in the afternoon on 16 may 2011 with a post explaining that aol had bought the huffington post and no longer needed two...
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2011-05-15
ShockHound (2008 - 2011)
hot topic was a mall chain that sold band shirts to american teenagers, and in late 2008 it opened an mp3 store where the shirt and the album went through the...
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2011-05-05
Qwerly (2010 - 2011)
thirty million lookups a month were going through the api and about fifty thousand people were visiting the website, so max niederhofer closed the website....
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2011-05-04
Lulu Poetry (2009 - 2011)
fourteen million poems were deleted on 4 may 2011, three weeks after the people holding them said they would be. lulu.com had bought poetry.com in 2009 from...
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2011-05-03
Jott (2006 - 2011)
jott was a us voice-to-text service that ran from april 2006 to may 2011. you called a toll-free number, spoke for up to thirty seconds, and jott transcribed...
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2011-05-03
MyPhotoAlbum (2004 - 2011)
the free-homepage company that ran fortunecity sold the homepages in June 2008, renamed itself MyPhotoAlbum Inc. after its photo service, bought dotPhoto a few...
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2011-05-01
Going.com (2007 - 2011)
a boston startup that wanted to be the thing you checked before you went out, back when checking meant sitting at a desktop. it listed nightlife and events...
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2011-05-01
PhoneValet Message Center (2003 - 2011)
a small box on the phone line with a mac behind it. parliant shipped phonevalet in july 2003 as a call log that announced callers out loud, then in 2004...
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2011-04-30
Whrrl (2007 - 2011)
whrrl was pelago's location-based check-in app built out of seattle by ex-amazon engineers jeff holden and darren vengroff. it launched in october 2007 as a...
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2011-04-30
Baidu Youa (2008 - 2011)
taobao had already won by october 2008 and baidu built a consumer marketplace anyway. youa opened in beta on the 18th and to everyone ten days later, with...
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2011-04-29
JamLegend (2008 - 2011)
two million registered players and a hundred and ten million recorded plays, all of it inside a browser tab with the number row standing in for a fretboard....
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2011-04-27
Urlesque (2008 - 2011)
stephen lenz was running moviefone for aol when he noticed that nobody in the company's very large stable of blogs was covering the internet itself. urlesque...
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2011-04-26
Flock (2005 - 2011)
flock launched in october 2005 from bart decrem and geoffrey arone as a firefox fork that built your social internet straight into the browser chrome. you got...
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2011-04-24
Adobe Soundbooth (2007 - 2011)
soundbooth was adobe's consumer-tier audio editor for the four years between adobe acquiring cool edit pro and the audition rebrand catching up. it shipped...
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2011-04-21
Yahoo Buzz (2008 - 2011)
yahoo buzz launched in february 2008 as a community-curated news front page where users could vote stories up and down, with a buzz button that publishers...
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2011-04-21
JoWooD Entertainment (1995 - 2011)
liezen is a town of about eight thousand people in styria, and for a decade it was the head office of a publicly listed video game publisher. jowood put...
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2011-04-20
PSP Go (2009 - 2011)
psp go was the umd-drive-removed psp variant sony shipped in october 2009 at $249, with a sliding face and 16gb of internal flash for download-only games....
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2011-04-15
Sun StarOffice (1985 - 2011)
staroffice was a hamburg-built office suite from 1985 that sun bought in 1999 because licensing microsoft office for 42,000 employees would have cost more than...
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2011-04-15
2collab (2007 - 2011)
2collab was elsevier's attempt at delicious for scientists. you saved the papers you read with their citation details attached, and shared a reading list with...
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2011-04-15
Yahoo!Xtra (2007 - 2011)
yahoo!xtra was a joint venture between yahoo!7 and telecom new zealand, announced in december 2006 and live on 1 march 2007. yahoo!7 held 51 percent and...
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2011-04-15
Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner (2005 - 2011)
a virus scan that ran inside a web page, from the years when that sounded like progress. microsoft opened windows live safety center in beta on 1 november 2005...
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2011-04-14
Encyclopedia Dramatica (2004 - 2011)
on 14 april 2011 sherrod degrippo pointed encyclopediadramatica.com at a clean new site called oh internet and said shock for shock's sake was old. the wiki...
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2011-04-12
Flip Video (2006 - 2011)
the flip was a pocket camcorder for a window of about three years between the death of the camcorder and the camera phone becoming good enough. cisco bought...
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2011-04-12
Download Squad (2005 - 2011)
a $315 million deal for the huffington post in february 2011 is what killed it. aol reorganized everything it owned under arianna huffington, and a blog about...
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2011-04-08
Google Hotpot (2010 - 2011)
five months is how long the name lasted. google needed a pile of restaurant ratings it owned outright after the yelp purchase fell apart, so on 15 november...
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2011-04-05
TokBox (2007 - 2011)
tokbox let you make a video call by sending someone a link, with no download and no account required, which in 2007 felt like a small miracle. it ran in the...
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2011-04-04
AlltheWeb (1999 - 2011)
alltheweb was the search engine you used when you wanted to feel smart about not just defaulting to google. it ran on the fast crawler out of trondheim,...
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2011-04-03
Gizmo5 (2005 - 2011)
a sip softphone built on open standards by michael robertson, the guy from mp3.com and linspire. cross-platform desktop and a couple of mobile clients. it ran...
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2011-04-01
Kosmix (2005 - 2011)
a search startup from the junglee founders that could not out-google google, so it kept becoming other things: vertical search, then auto-built topic pages....
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2011-04-01
Flexplay (EZ-D) (2003 - 2011)
flexplay sold a dvd with a dye sitting in the resin between its two halves, and the dye reacted with air. sealed in a vacuum pack it kept for about a year....
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2011-04-01
PhotoWorks (1976 - 2011)
photoworks began in 1976 as seattle filmworks, a mail-order lab that sold respooled motion picture film and developed it by post. every envelope came back with...
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2011-04-01
Qwest (1996 - 2011)
a railroad right of way is a thin strip of land that already runs between every city in the country, and philip anschutz owned one. qwest was the company that...
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2011-04-01
HanseNet (1995 - 2011)
hamburg's electricity company started an internet provider in 1995 because it already owned ducts under the city. an italian broadband firm bought most of it...
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2011-04-01
feedalizr (2008 - 2011)
cape town and são paulo built the first desktop client for friendfeed, shipped it as an adobe air download in april 2008, and kept adding services to it until...
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2011-03-31
Thumbplay (2004 - 2011)
thumbplay launched in september 2004 as a new york mobile-content subscription. ten dollars a month for ten credits, spend the credits on ringtones,...
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2011-03-31
Windows Live Toolbar (2005 - 2011)
windows live toolbar was microsoft's replacement for the msn search toolbar, shipping in the windows live wave series inside internet explorer 6 through 8. the...
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2011-03-31
The Agency: Covert Ops (2007 - 2011)
sony online entertainment announced a spy mmo in july 2007 for playstation 3 and pc, with no character classes and a promise that one shot to the head killed...
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2011-03-31
Blink (2002 - 2011)
oslo, 1 february 2002: a norwegian newspaper opened a social network before english had settled on a word for one. blink was built inside db medialab,...
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2011-03-31
smart.fm (2007 - 2011)
1,000 yen a month was the number that ended it. cerego japan opened the site in october 2007 as iknow!, a japanese-only drill for people learning english,...
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2011-03-28
Revolution Money (2007 - 2011)
american express agreed to buy revolution money in november 2009 for around three hundred million dollars and closed the deal that january. fourteen months...
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2011-03-27
FLO TV / MediaFLO (2007 - 2011)
flo tv was qualcomm's bet that the future of mobile video was a broadcast tower and a tuner inside the phone. verizon launched the first version in march 2007...
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2011-03-23
Swoopo (2005 - 2011)
the model was pay-per-bid: every bid cost real money, and every bid reset the clock. if you were the last person standing, you got a laptop for eleven dollars....
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2011-03-20
Twitoaster (2009 - 2011)
twitter in 2009 had no threads. replies landed as loose messages with an @ stuck on the front, and reassembling a conversation was manual work, so arnaud...
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2011-03-16
Windows Live Spaces (2004 - 2011)
windows live spaces launched in december 2004 as msn spaces, microsoft's answer to blogger and myspace bolted onto the msn messenger identity that most of the...
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2011-03-15
Faunasphere (2009 - 2011)
a browser game about cleaning up a polluted world one animal at a time. big fish games launched it in 2009 and put a facebook version out the next year, then...
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2011-03-15
Dimdim (2006 - 2011)
salesforce bought dimdim on 6 january 2011 for thirty one million dollars, and the notices went out almost immediately: free accounts would stop working on 15...
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2011-03-11
Google Gears (2007 - 2011)
google gears was a browser plugin from 2007 that added the features web apps did not yet have: a local sqlite database, background worker threads, a local...
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2011-03-10
Politics Daily (2009 - 2011)
twenty two paid journalists, several of them on six figures, hired in a single month of 2009 to give aol a washington bureau it could point at. melinda...
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2011-03-08
Fotopic.net (2001 - 2011)
fotopic.net was a british photo-share host that ran from 2001 to 2011. it was the online home of a large amateur uk railway photography archive and a smaller...
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2011-03-07
Next New Networks (2007 - 2011)
five people started next new networks in march 2007 with eight million dollars, on the idea that web video needed programmed channels rather than loose...
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2011-03-01
Outside.in (2006 - 2011)
a brooklyn startup that tried to turn local blogs into news for any zip code you typed. it worked best where the neighborhoods were dense and the bloggers were...
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2011-02-28
Cedega (2001 - 2011)
transgaming forked wine while it was still under a permissive license and closed the source, then sold the result as a five dollar a month subscription for...
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2011-02-28
Swebits (2004 - 2011)
on 31 may 2006 swedish police walked into a hosting facility looking for the pirate bay and carried swebits servers out with them, which took a year and seven...
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2011-02-27
Djangy (2010 - 2011)
two founders spent about seven months building a push-to-deploy host for django apps, got as far as a private beta with an email waiting list, and then decided...
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2011-02-26
PictoChat (2004 - 2011)
ten meters was the whole network. pictochat came preloaded on every nintendo ds from november 2004, with no account and no server behind it, which meant it...
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2011-02-23
TBD.com (2010 - 2011)
tbd was allbritton's washington dc hyperlocal news bet. jim brady ran it and erik wemple edited it. traffic hit 1.5 million unique viewers in six months....
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2011-02-22
ivi TV (2010 - 2011)
$4.99 a month bought you new york and seattle broadcast television on a computer anywhere in the world, which is the part the networks could not live with. ivi...
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2011-02-18
Bizarre Creations (1994 - 2011)
bizarre creations was a british game studio that made the project gotham racing series for microsoft. geometry wars was their tiny inside-joke breakout....
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2011-02-17
Sonic Solutions (1986 - 2011)
three people walked out of lucasfilm's audio division in 1986 and built the machine that took the hiss off old recordings. nonoise shipped in mid 1987 and the...
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2011-02-15
Microsoft CardSpace (2006 - 2011)
cardspace was microsoft's attempt to put a system-level identity wallet inside windows. it shipped with .net 3.0 in november 2006 under the codename infocard,...
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2011-02-15
Windows CardSpace (2006 - 2011)
kim cameron wrote seven laws of identity for microsoft and cardspace was the product built to obey them. you would keep your logins as cards in a wallet on...
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2011-02-14
Microsoft Virtual PC (1997 - 2011)
virtual pc was the desktop virtualization product connectix released in june 1997 for mac and ported to windows by 1999. microsoft acquired it in february...
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2011-02-14
TradElect (2007 - 2011)
accenture built it on windows server 2003 and sql server 2000, the london stock exchange paid around forty million pounds, and in june 2007 it replaced a...
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2011-02-13
Playhouse Disney (1999 - 2011)
at 8:55 on the morning of 13 february 2011 a preschool block signed off with a short episode of handy manny's school for tools, and the following day the same...
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2011-02-09
Palm Pilot (1996 - 2011)
the personal digital assistant. before smartphones, you carried a palm pilot for your calendar, contacts, and notes. graffiti was the handwriting input system...
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2011-02-01
Plastic.com (2001 - 2011)
plastic was a community link aggregator launched in january 2001 by automatic media, the umbrella that briefly held feed and suck.com after both webzines...
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2011-02-01
Portal of Evil (1999 - 2011)
portal of evil was a catalog of the weirdest personal websites on the internet, built in cleveland in late 1999 by k. thor jensen and chet faliszek, with a...
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2011-02-01
Modu (2007 - 2011)
dov moran sold the company that made the usb flash drive for one point six billion dollars and spent the next four years on a phone the size of a credit card...
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2011-02-01
Vinismo (2007 - 2011)
vinismo was an encyclopedia of wine running on mediawiki, started in montreal by evan prodromou after wikitravel and licensed so that anybody could copy the...
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2011-02-01
Mozilla Prism (2007 - 2011)
benjamin smedberg built the prototype as a conference demo in 2006 and mark finkle turned it into a mozilla labs project called prism, which put one web app in...
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2011-01-31
Wizard Magazine (1991 - 2011)
wizard was the bible of north american comic collectors from the early-1990s bubble through twenty years of decline. it shipped 235 monthly issues, ran a...
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2011-01-31
Apple Xserve (2002 - 2011)
apple's nine-year experiment in selling rack-mount servers to companies that already owned a lot of macs. the xserve launched at wwdc 2002 with a powerpc g4...
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2011-01-31
SideStep (1999 - 2011)
sidestep launched in 1999 as a browser plugin that searched airline and hotel sites from inside internet explorer. through the 2000s it became one of the...
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2011-01-26
Bakchich (2006 - 2011)
bakchich.info launched in may 2006 as a french investigative and satirical news site, named after the arabic word for the money you hand an official to make a...
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2011-01-25
fflick (2010 - 2011)
fflick read movie tweets and sorted them into positive and negative buckets. it launched in august 2010 and google bought it five months later for ten million...
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2011-01-24
GetRight (1997 - 2011)
getright did one thing that mattered enormously on a dial-up modem, it let you resume a download that had died halfway. before it, a dropped connection at...
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2011-01-23
VeryCD (2003 - 2011)
verycd was china's great index of the ed2k network, a site where you searched for a film or an album and got the emule link that pulled it down over the...
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2011-01-21
WinAce (1999 - 2011)
ace beat rar on compression by a few percent for about two years, and a few percent was never going to be enough against a format that was already on...
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2011-01-21
UK Online (1994 - 2011)
sky bought easynet in 2005 and inherited a dial-up isp from 1994 that had spent the previous year embarrassing the entire british broadband market with an 8mb...
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2011-01-19
Propaganda Games (2005 - 2011)
vancouver game studio that lived almost entirely inside disney interactive. founded september 2005 by ex-eaa and ex-radical staff, bought by disney within...
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2011-01-18
Kodachrome (1935 - 2011)
kodachrome was color film with no color in it. the dyes went in at the lab, during a development process so specific that by the end there was exactly one...
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2011-01-17
Nokia Comes with Music (2008 - 2011)
nokia comes with music was the bundled unlimited music subscription that shipped with an xpressmusic phone in the uk on 17 october 2008. one year of downloads...
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2011-01-17
The Sims Carnival (2008 - 2011)
ea put a game-making tool on the web in february 2008 and hung the sims name on it, so that anybody could assemble a flash game from supplied art and publish...
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2011-01-15
Blue Mars (2009 - 2011)
blue mars was the honolulu-based virtual world platform from avatar reality that opened public beta in september 2009 with the pitch of being a next-generation...
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2011-01-05
Wik.is (2007 - 2011)
mindtouch forked mediawiki in 2006, threw out wiki markup in favor of xhtml and a wysiwyg editor, then gave the result away as free hosting on a two-letter...
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2011-01-04
Motorola, Inc. (1928 - 2011)
two brothers named galvin incorporated it in chicago in 1928 to sell a box that let battery radios run off wall current. eighty-two years later it had made the...
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2011-01-04
Mercury (1938 - 2011)
edsel ford drew a brand to fill the price gap between a ford and a lincoln, and for forty years that gap was real enough to sell cars into. by 2010 mercury...
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2011-01-03
Blipville (2005 - 2011)
twelve was the average age of a blipville user, which tells you most of what the site was. tv4 ran a virtual town on a fictional caribbean island called s:t...
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2011-01-01
Salon Premium (2001 - 2011)
salon premium was the subscription program david talbot's salon ran from april 2001 to roughly 2011. the pitch was a small share of the magazine's content...
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2011-01-01
Drunk Duck (2002 - 2011)
drunk duck was a free webcomic hosting platform dylan squires launched in 2002. the name came from a friend's drawing of squires' dead pet duck. by the mid...
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2011-01-01
GLEE.com (2007 - 2011)
glee.com launched in february 2007 as community connect's lgbt social network. it was the last addition to the same portfolio that already ran blackplanet for...
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2011-01-01
Yahoo Pulse (2010 - 2011)
yahoo pulse was a june 6 2010 rename of yahoo profiles, launched as part of yahoo's facebook integration push under carol bartz. it offered a single dashboard...
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2011-01-01
ChinaRen (1999 - 2011)
a stanford-alumni founder trio built china's first mainstream campus community in 1999. sohu bought them in september 2000 for around thirty million dollars in...
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2011-01-01
Sxipper (2007 - 2011)
sxipper was a firefox extension that filled login forms and managed openid personas, built by sxip identity in vancouver under dick hardt. it launched publicly...
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2011-01-01
Jabberwacky (1997 - 2011)
one of the first web chatbots that actually learned from what people typed at it. rollo carpenter had been carrying the project since 1988. it went online in...
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2011-01-01
gamerDNA (2006 - 2011)
gamerdna was a social network for video game players, built around the character you played as rather than the person behind the keyboard. it stored game...
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2011-01-01
Mynet Sohbet (1999 - 2011)
mynet sohbet was where turkish people talked to strangers before facebook arrived and made everyone use their real name. rooms sorted by city and by age,...
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2011-01-01
Ayna.com (1997 - 2011)
in arabic أين is transliterated ayna and means where, which is the correct name for a search engine and one nobody in the english-speaking web ever thought of....
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2011-01-01
Spurl.net (2004 - 2011)
spurl was the icelandic answer to del.icio.us and it had one idea the winner did not. when you saved a page, spurl kept a copy of the text, so you could...
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2011-01-01
Advanced Photo System (1996 - 2011)
five camera companies spent about a billion dollars building a film format that carried its own exposure data on a magnetic layer and let you choose the shape...
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2011-01-01
GameDaily (2004 - 2011)
gamedaily started as a trade newsletter that landed in the inbox of people who made games for a living, and gigex bought it in may 2004 and built a consumer...
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2011-01-01
Postopia (2001 - 2011)
post cereals put a games portal on the web in february 2001 and ran it for ten years, mascot worlds and flash games built by an outfit called skyworks. the...
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2011-01-01
Forestle (2008 - 2011)
a twenty-five-year-old in wittenberg built a search engine in 2008 that promised to protect a tenth of a square meter of rainforest per query and handed 90...
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2011-01-01
One Million Monkeys Typing (2007 - 2011)
a collaborative fiction site built by nina zito and ilya kreymerman where a story was a tree instead of a line. you posted a snippet of a few hundred words at...
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2011-01-01
ImHalal (2009 - 2011)
imhalal opened on 1 september 2009 out of the netherlands, built by reza sardeha after he and his friends got tired of ordinary search engines returning things...
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2011-01-01
Lemondrop (2008 - 2011)
tim armstrong's reorganization closed aol's men's site and its women's site in the same week. lemondrop had launched in september 2008 with the tagline...
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2011-01-01
Open Source Cinema (2007 - 2011)
a montreal filmmaker put his raw footage on the web under a creative commons license, built an editor into the browser, and told anyone who showed up to cut it...
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2011-01-01
字幕.in (2007 - 2011)
a jobless 25-year-old built it in january 2007, because niconico douga had shown him that comments belonged on top of the video and not under it. 字幕.in let you...
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2011-01-01
Roma Victor (2006 - 2011)
a small studio in brighton built thirty square kilometers of second-century britannia and let the local magistrate nail players to a cross for a week at a...
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2011-01-01
Factor 5 (1987 - 2011)
cologne, 1987: five people walk out of rainbow arts to work for themselves and spend the next decade pulling more out of cheap hardware than the documentation...
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2011-01-01
Shkolny Portal (2007 - 2011)
13,950,000 rubles of federal money bought a link directory, a borrowed mail service and a forum on off-the-shelf software, presented to the education minister...
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2011-01-01
U.B. Funkeys (2007 - 2011)
a white plastic dock sat next to the family pc, and whichever little vinyl figure you clipped onto it became your character in a windows world called...
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2011-01-01
Gregarius (2004 - 2011)
marco shipped gregarius 0.6.1 on 26 november 2008 and never wrote another release note. the project site and its seven subdomains kept answering anyway,...
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2010-12-31
Compaq iPAQ (2000 - 2010)
the compaq ipaq was a line of pocket pc handhelds launched in april 2000, running microsoft's windows mobile stack and aimed at business users who wanted a...
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2010-12-31
Lycos (1994 - 2010)
one of the early big four search engines (with altavista, yahoo, infoseek) before google. CMU spinoff. went public in 1996. terra networks of spain bought it...
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2010-12-31
Personal Homepages (the cultural form) (1995 - 2010)
the personal homepage as a cultural form. roughly 1995 to 2010. you got free hosting somewhere (geocities, angelfire, multimania) and you made a page about...
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2010-12-31
Sony Mylo (2006 - 2010)
the mylo was a wifi-only pocket device with no cellular radio, marketed at american teenagers in 2006 who could lean on free t-mobile hotspots for a year. it...
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2010-12-31
Ultima Online (the cultural era) (1997 - 2010)
the 2D isometric medieval mmorpg from 1997. you were a small avatar in a big shared world. you mined ore. you tamed dragons. you got murdered by a player named...
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2010-12-31
Millsberry (2004 - 2010)
general mills built an entire virtual town to sell breakfast cereal to children. you walked a small cartoon buddy around metro park, golden valley, ravenwood...
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2010-12-31
Dizzywood (2007 - 2010)
a san francisco studio with money from a cnet co-founder built a browser world for eight to fourteen year olds, and built it around quests rather than around a...
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2010-12-31
Teen Second Life (2005 - 2010)
linden lab ran two worlds for almost six years, one for adults and one for anybody aged thirteen to seventeen, and the teenagers got the smaller one with the...
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2010-12-31
Scoop / Youpost (סקופ) (2006 - 2010)
a researcher at ben-gurion university counted where the stories came from and found that israel's professional news sites ran about half their items off press...
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2010-12-31
Nanovor (2009 - 2010)
jordan weisman created battletech and shadowrun, then raised $29 million to make a card battler for american ten-year-olds. nanovor went into public beta in...
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2010-12-31
Glubble (2007 - 2010)
a firefox add-on that let a parent hand over the family computer without handing over the whole web. glaxstar shipped glubble for families on 18 june 2007 with...
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2010-12-30
Huxley: The Dystopia (2005 - 2010)
webzen showed huxley at e3 in 2005 as one of the first announced unreal engine 3 games and as the mmofps, a persistent-world game with the aiming of a shooter....
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2010-12-28
Viewzi (2006 - 2010)
a visual search engine out of dallas that refused to hand back a list. you typed a query and it picked which of its layouts fit, an album wall for a band or a...
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2010-12-27
Phantasy Star Online (2000 - 2010)
sega put a four player action rpg on the dreamcast in december 2000 and made the online half the entire point, which no console game had pulled off before. you...
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2010-12-25
Swiftfox (2005 - 2010)
eleven cpu-specific binaries of the same browser, cut by one man on a dreamhost account and paid for with a donate button. swiftfox existed because mozilla...
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2010-12-21
BookArmy (2009 - 2010)
a publisher's attempt to own the place where readers talk about books. harpercollins uk built it with a partner in february 2009 and filled it with pages for...
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2010-12-19
Nettby (2006 - 2010)
nettby was the norwegian social network that schibsted's vg multimedia opened september 14 2006 as a community layer next to the vg.no tabloid. members used...
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2010-12-18
BBC Switch (2007 - 2010)
the bbc had children's television and it had radio 1, and between them sat an age group with nothing addressed to it. switch was the answer, a saturday...
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2010-12-15
drop.io (2007 - 2010)
drop.io let you create a private file 'drop' at a custom url with no signup needed. you could send to it from email, web upload, voicemail, or even a fax...
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2010-12-09
Phoenix Dynasty Online (2006 - 2010)
on 9 december 2010 ingle games posted that it was closing every phoenix dynasty online server that day, and then did it. the game was a free to play fantasy...
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2010-12-08
WebSocket draft-hixie-76 (2010 - 2010)
on 8 december 2010 two browsers turned off a feature they had already shipped. adam barth had shown that the handshake in ian hickson's -76 draft could be read...
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2010-12-02
Stile Project (1999 - 2010)
jay stile's shock-aggregator site, registered october 3, 1999. ran for eleven years as part of the english-language shock canon alongside rotten.com and...
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2010-12-01
Microsoft Office Communicator (2005 - 2010)
office communicator was the in-office im client that microsoft shipped with live communications server, then office communications server. it gave corporate...
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2010-12-01
backstage.bbc.co.uk (2005 - 2010)
in 2005 the bbc opened a pile of its own feeds to anybody who asked for them and put a motto on the front page: use our stuff to build your stuff. news...
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2010-12-01
WildStorm (1992 - 2010)
on 21 september 2010 dc announced that the wildstorm banner would end that december, eighteen years after jim lee founded the studio as one of the original...
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2010-11-30
Thottbot (2001 - 2010)
bill dyess started thottbot in 2001 as an mmorpg news site and rebuilt it in 2004 as a searchable database for world of warcraft. the data came from an in-game...
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2010-11-30
Rakuten Links (2006 - 2010)
it was labeled beta on the day it opened and it was still labeled beta four and a half years later when rakuten turned it off. 楽天広場リンクス started on 27 march...
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2010-11-29
Worldchanging (2003 - 2010)
alex steffen and jamais cascio started worldchanging in october 2003 to write about sustainability as a distribution problem rather than as a coming disaster....
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2010-11-22
Cliqset (2009 - 2010)
darren bounds and charlie cauthen built cliqset in jacksonville, florida, and pointed it at a problem everybody agreed was real: your posts were scattered...
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2010-11-19
EVEREST (2004 - 2010)
hardware diagnostics for people who built their own machines. lavalys shipped everest home and pro on may 3 2004, written by tamás miklós, who had stopped work...
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2010-11-12
GOOG-411 (2007 - 2010)
goog-411 was a phone number, 1-800-goog-411, that let you speak the name of a business and have google find it and connect the call, for free. it launched in...
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2010-11-08
Apple HomePage (2000 - 2010)
five templates and a publish button, and apple would host the result at homepage.mac.com under a name you had picked yourself. it started free in january 2000...
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2010-11-04
Bloglines (2003 - 2010)
the web-based rss reader that ran the blog-following layer of the open web for the eighteen months before google reader showed up. mark fletcher launched it in...
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2010-11-04
GoFish (2003 - 2010)
november 2010: a company that had once been a video site with close to twenty million users stopped paying the publishers it sold ads for, and then stopped...
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2010-11-01
JXTA (2001 - 2010)
sun's answer to the peer-to-peer moment was not an application but a set of open protocols meant to let anything with a processor find anything else and hold a...
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2010-11-01
BlogRolling.com (2002 - 2010)
on 6 october 2010 tucows put up a post titled "blogrolling will cease operation november 1st", and the early blogosphere lost the thing that held it together....
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2010-11-01
BrightFuse (2009 - 2010)
careerbuilder made its money selling job listings and access to resumes. in august 2009 it launched a free professional network where none of that was for...
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2010-10-31
Pontiac (1926 - 2010)
the presidential task force on the auto industry read general motors' first survival plan in early 2009 and sent it back for deeper cuts. pontiac was in the...
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2010-10-31
Saturn Corporation (1985 - 2010)
spring hill, tennessee got a multi-billion dollar plant and a union contract written from scratch, because general motors wanted to find out whether it could...
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2010-10-31
Infoseek isweb Light (2001 - 2010)
roughly two million japanese personal homepages stopped existing at around two in the morning on 1 november 2010. isweb light was the free tier of rakuten's...
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2010-10-26
LimeWire (2000 - 2010)
limewire was the file-sharing client your friend with the slow connection used. it was a slow java app full of mislabeled mp3s. the riaa came for it in 2006,...
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2010-10-26
Microsoft Entourage (2000 - 2010)
entourage shipped in october 2000 as part of office 2001 for mac, a personal information manager combining email with calendar and address book and tasks and...
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2010-10-26
Gnutella (2000 - 2010)
two nullsoft engineers released a file-sharing network with nothing in the middle of it, and aol took the download off the site inside twenty-four hours. too...
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2010-10-22
Sony Walkman (1979 - 2010)
the original portable cassette player. invented personal music in 1979. it ran the world's listening habits for thirty years. sony stopped making cassette...
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2010-10-22
12seconds.tv (2008 - 2010)
12seconds.tv was a video status service built around one rule, a clip of twelve seconds or less. it launched in 2008 and leaned hard on twitter, posting your...
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2010-10-21
Sharp Mebius (1995 - 2010)
sharp put the mebius name on laptops in 1995 and spent fifteen years making them thinner than anybody else was willing to try. the muramasa machines got a 12...
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2010-10-20
Whole Wheat Radio (2002 - 2010)
jim kloss ran a 24-hour independent music station out of a cabin in talkeetna, alaska, and the listeners built the catalog alongside him on a wiki. it had...
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2010-10-19
BlackBerry Storm (2008 - 2010)
the storm was research in motion's iphone-killer for verizon, the carrier that did not yet have the iphone and wanted a touchscreen flagship of its own. it...
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2010-10-15
Nokia Ovi Files (2008 - 2010)
a nokia cloud service that shipped two years before nokia had a cloud strategy. ovi files let you mirror your windows or mac desktop to your phone and open...
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2010-10-15
BlogBurst (2006 - 2010)
three thousand four hundred blogs were in the network at the top, feeding the washington post and reuters among others, and the standard rate for being in it...
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2010-10-11
Microsoft Vine (2009 - 2010)
microsoft vine was the post-katrina social network microsoft tried to build for emergencies. you would log in during a disaster and find the people in your...
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2010-10-09
Trance.nu (1999 - 2010)
trance.nu was the english-language headquarters of a genre, run out of the netherlands and sweden by volunteers who reviewed everything that came out. seventy...
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2010-10-08
Microsoft Live Labs Pivot (2010 - 2011)
microsoft live labs pivot was a data-visualization client built on the seadragon deep-zoom engine, released as a free download in february 2010 and demoed by...
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2010-10-08
Zenbe (2006 - 2010)
zenbe was a webmail service out of new york that tried to make email into something more than a stack of messages. its odd idea was the zenpage, a shared space...
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2010-10-04
Falha de S. Paulo (2010 - 2010)
two brothers in são paulo swapped one vowel in a newspaper's name and published a parody of its election coverage. seventeen days later the frias family held...
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2010-10-01
NBC Direct (2007 - 2010)
nbc direct was nbc universal's own download-to-watch service for prime-time episodes, launched in november 2007 in beta and through three painful iterations...
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2010-10-01
Propeller.com (2006 - 2010)
propeller.com was aol's social-news play, launched in june 2006 as a relaunched netscape.com built around user-voted stories under jason calacanis. it was...
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2010-10-01
Yahoo! SearchMonkey (2008 - 2010)
the microsoft deal is what killed this one. yahoo switched off searchmonkey on 1 october 2010, twenty-nine months after opening it, because bing was taking...
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2010-10-01
Massive Incorporated (2002 - 2010)
the billboards in burnout paradise carried an obama campaign ad in october 2008, across eighteen games in ten early-voting states, and this is the company that...
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2010-09-30
Vox (2006 - 2010)
vox was a 2006 blogging platform from the company behind movable type and typepad, with livejournal in the same building. it was meant to be the prettier home...
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2010-09-30
Grazr (2006 - 2010)
2006 was the year a lot of smart people decided rss was the default api to the web, and grazr was built on that sentence taken literally. michael kowalchik's...
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2010-09-30
Quattro Wireless (2006 - 2010)
apple wanted admob, google paid $750 million for admob, and apple bought the runner-up instead. quattro wireless changed hands in january 2010 for $275 million...
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2010-09-29
Ma.gnolia (2006 - 2010)
magnolia was the social bookmarking site that lost everything in a single night. it launched in 2006 as the prettier alternative to delicious, gathered a small...
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2010-09-29
Avatars United (2008 - 2010)
a group of swedish friends who played games together built a social network for the characters rather than the people behind them. your profile was an avatar...
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2010-09-22
Amie Street (2006 - 2010)
amie street launched july 4 2006 out of brown university with a strange pricing trick: every song started at zero dollars when uploaded, then climbed toward 98...
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2010-09-17
Cuil (2008 - 2010)
the search engine that launched on 28 july 2008 with a tagline about indexing more pages than google. anna patterson and her husband tom costello had built it...
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2010-09-16
APB - All Points Bulletin (2010 - 2010)
apb is the 79-day collapse you cite when somebody asks how fast a triple-a launch can sink. dave jones's gta-meets-mmo burned through somewhere north of $100...
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2010-09-16
Adobe Media Player (2007 - 2010)
adobe built a television application for the desktop out of its own air runtime, showed it in april 2007 and shipped 1.0 a year later, with cbs and pbs among...
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2010-09-14
Haystack (2009 - 2010)
in march 2010 the us treasury licensed a piece of software for export to iran, which had not happened before, and the software was haystack. the press had...
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2010-09-07
VersionTracker (1995 - 2010)
versiontracker was a software-update directory created in 1995 by kurt christensen in sacramento. it started as a mac-only catalog of shareware versions and...
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2010-09-06
Polar Rose (2004 - 2010)
fourteen days is the whole story here. polar rose switched off its face recognition service on 6 september 2010, saying it was becoming a licensing business,...
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2010-09-02
PC Zone (1993 - 2010)
dennis publishing launched it in april 1993 as the first british monthly that covered nothing but pc games, and it spent seventeen years being ruder about them...
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2010-09-01
Apple TV (1st generation) (2007 - 2010)
the first apple tv was a small intel-based mac-mini-shaped silver box. it had a hard drive, a syncing relationship with itunes, and a clear job: get content...
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2010-09-01
Nedstat (1996 - 2010)
nedstat was an amsterdam web-counter and stats service launched in early 1996 by michiel berger with hans veldhuizen. the free counter became a ubiquitous...
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2010-09-01
Covad (1996 - 2010)
covad put its own dsl equipment inside the phone company's exchanges and sold the resulting lines wholesale, so the broadband you bought from earthlink or from...
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2010-09-01
Exteel (2007 - 2010)
ncsoft put out a third-person mech shooter on 4 december 2007, korea and north america on the same day, free to download and paid for with nccoins. you built a...
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2010-09-01
Hot Potato (2009 - 2010)
justin shaffer left major league baseball's website in 2008 and built an app that asked what you were doing instead of where you were standing. hot potato went...
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2010-09-01
Pogodak (2004 - 2010)
telekom slovenije paid 8.55 million euros in 2007 for three quarters of interseek, the slovenian company that ran najdi.si at home and ran pogodak everywhere...
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2010-09-01
OhmyNews International (2004 - 2010)
oh yeon-ho's line was that every citizen is a reporter, and in korea it worked well enough to be credited with helping decide a presidential election. the...
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2010-09-01
Go-oo (2007 - 2010)
michael meeks had been patching openoffice.org since 2003, and in october 2007 novell let the patch set out under a name of its own. go-oo read microsoft works...
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2010-08-31
Yedda (2005 - 2010)
yedda was an israeli question-and-answer site out of tel aviv. it shipped in early 2006 with semantic search that tried to route a question to the user most...
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2010-08-31
Kuvalauta (2007 - 2010)
finland's imageboard for three years, run by somebody calling himself gabo whose real name has never been published. it sat inside the country's two hundred...
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2010-08-31
Microsoft Response Point (2007 - 2010)
in 2007 microsoft sold a phone system to companies with under fifty employees, and its selling point was a blue button on the handset that you held down and...
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2010-08-30
ATI Technologies (1985 - 2010)
ati was the canadian gpu company that fought nvidia for the consumer 3d-graphics market for fifteen years, then got bought by amd in 2006 and had its name...
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2010-08-29
Microsoft FolderShare (2001 - 2010)
foldershare was a peer-to-peer file sync tool created by bytetaxi in 2001 and acquired by microsoft on november 3 2005. it sat in the windows live stack as the...
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2010-08-27
Bots!! (2006 - 2010)
a korean studio called n-log soft made a game about robots fighting computer viruses, and acclaim games published it in the west in november 2006 as the launch...
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2010-08-25
DiggBar (2009 - 2010)
on 2 april 2009 digg shipped a toolbar that turned any address into digg.com plus a few characters. the page you asked for loaded underneath it inside a frame,...
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2010-08-18
LunarStorm (2000 - 2010)
swedish teenagers had their own pre-facebook social network for a decade. lunarstorm opened on the first of january 2000, peaked at 1.2 million members with...
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2010-08-17
Realtime Worlds (2000 - 2010)
dundee studio, founded february 7 2000 by david jones after he left dma design behind. it shipped crackdown on xbox 360 in 2007. five years and over a hundred...
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2010-08-13
OpenSolaris (2005 - 2010)
opensolaris was sun microsystems opening its own unix, starting with dtrace in january 2005 and the bulk of the solaris source that june. it had a written...
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2010-08-10
Motionbox (2006 - 2010)
motionbox was a video-sharing site out of new york, built for people who wanted to share clips with a few friends instead of the whole internet. chris o'brien...
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2010-08-04
Playlogic Entertainment (2002 - 2010)
playlogic was the largest game publisher the netherlands had, which in practice meant an amsterdam office and a shell company trading over the counter in new...
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2010-08-01
Microsoft Photo Story 3 (2003 - 2010)
microsoft photo story started as a research project for adding narrated motion to still photos. the first version shipped in 2003 inside the paid plus! digital...
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2010-08-01
Odeo (2005 - 2010)
odeo was a podcast directory and recording studio in a browser. noah glass and evan williams started building it in early '05 in san francisco. for about a...
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2010-08-01
The Chronicles of Spellborn (2008 - 2010)
a dutch-developed mmo with a real-time combat system that was unusual for its era. spellborn international launched the european version through frogster on 27...
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2010-08-01
Fighter Ace (1997 - 2010)
microsoft put its first premium game on the internet gaming zone on 18 december 1997 and charged a dollar ninety-five a day for it. fighter ace was world war...
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2010-08-01
Hotbar (1999 - 2010)
two founders put a plugin into internet explorer in 1999 that gave you emoticons for your email and skins for the browser window, and paid for it by watching...
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2010-07-31
Hollywood Video / Movie Gallery (1988 - 2010)
hollywood video was mark wattles's portland video-rental chain that started in 1988 and grew to about 2,000 stores by the early 2000s, the second-largest chain...
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2010-07-31
Wesabe (2006 - 2010)
wesabe was the personal finance startup that launched before mint and shut down after it. marc hedlund and jason knight founded it in late 2005, the site went...
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2010-07-31
True/Slant (2009 - 2010)
true/slant was lewis dvorkin's 2009 attempt to build a news site around individual contributor pages. journalists got their own url, their own audience, and a...
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2010-07-30
Bing Cashback (2008 - 2010)
bing cashback was microsoft's attempt to bribe shoppers into searching through its engine instead of google's. money back on purchases at participating...
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2010-07-24
Gcast (2005 - 2010)
a telephone call was the entire recording studio. you dialed gcast's 800 number, punched in your pin, said what you had to say, and by the time you got back to...
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2010-07-21
Yahoo! Personals (1997 - 2010)
yahoo personals was the dating service yahoo ran from 1997 until they gave up and outsourced the whole thing to match.com in 2010. at peak it was one of the...
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2010-07-19
DontDateHimGirl.com (2005 - 2010)
in february 2006 the new york times called it a dating credit report, which was the founder's own phrase and the entire pitch. tasha joseph ran a miami site...
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2010-07-16
quarterlife (2007 - 2010)
marshall herskovitz and edward zwick, the men behind thirtysomething and my so-called life, put a drama on myspace in november 2007, and nine million views...
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2010-07-15
Real Alternative (2003 - 2010)
realplayer was the toll you paid to watch a .rm file, and a lot of people decided the toll was too high. real alternative unbundled it: the realmedia codecs...
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2010-07-15
1 vs. 100 (2009 - 2010)
1 vs. 100 was the only thing microsoft ever shipped on xbox live primetime, a service built to run actual game shows on a schedule rather than games you start...
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2010-07-13
Windows 2000 (1999 - 2010)
december 1999 is when microsoft handed it to manufacturing, and three days before the february retail launch a leaked internal memo counted over 63,000...
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2010-07-02
T-Mobile Sidekick (2002 - 2010)
the phone with the screen that swiveled open to a full qwerty keyboard underneath. built by danger inc, sold by t-mobile in the US, made famous by paris...
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2010-07-01
LeapFrog Leapster (2003 - 2010)
the leapster was leapfrog's kids handheld. cartridges, a stylus, a screen that played math and reading software dressed up as videogames. it shipped in october...
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2010-07-01
Zuda Comics (2007 - 2010)
zuda was dc comics deciding that the way to find webcomics talent was a monthly popularity contest. ten eight-page submissions went up inside a flash viewer,...
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2010-07-01
SourceOECD (2001 - 2010)
the oecd's own library, sold by subscription to institutions rather than to people. it launched in 2001 with around 250 books a year and 82 statistical...
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2010-07-01
GOA (1999 - 2010)
goa was france telecom's game portal, live from march 1999 until july 2010. it did matchmaking for free: one chat room per game, rooms you filled with...
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2010-07-01
Palm, Inc. (1992 - 2010)
minus twenty two billion dollars. that is what the stock market said 3com was worth without palm on the first day palm traded on its own in march 2000, and the...
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2010-06-30
GarageBand.com (the music community) (1999 - 2010)
the peer-review music platform for unsigned musicians. you uploaded an mp3, other users reviewed it, top-reviewed tracks made an official radio show. george...
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2010-06-30
Microsoft Kin (2010 - 2010)
the kin one and kin two were two phones microsoft built for teenagers in 2010, by way of buying the danger sidekick team and then making them rebuild the os on...
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2010-06-30
NinjaVideo (2008 - 2010)
ninjavideo ran from february '08 to june '10 as a link-and-stream site for movies and tv shows. at its peak it was getting six million visits a month, mostly...
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2010-06-30
Dash Express (2008 - 2010)
dash navigation shipped a car navigator in march 2008 with a cell modem and wi-fi inside it, so every unit sent its own speed and position home, then the...
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2010-06-26
NewsTilt (2010 - 2010)
two computer scientists went through y combinator with a plan to fix journalism for journalists. the product launched in april 2010 and was gone by the end of...
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2010-06-25
JournoList (2007 - 2010)
ezra klein started a private google group in february 2007 so that a few hundred american political writers could argue with each other off the record. he...
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2010-06-22
Piratbyrån (2003 - 2010)
the tracker came second. a swedish anti-copyright think tank set itself up on 1 august 2003 to argue with the record industry in public, and one of the things...
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2010-06-12
The Memory Hole (2002 - 2010)
russ kick asked the air force for every photograph of a flag-draped coffin arriving at dover, was refused outright, appealed, and on 21 april 2004 was handed a...
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2010-06-10
(Lil) Green Patch (2008 - 2010)
a garden that lived on your facebook profile, watered by clicking, growing faster when your friends clicked too. in september 2008 it was the single most used...
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2010-06-10
Tanarus (1997 - 2010)
tanarus was an online tank game that verant interactive built before everquest and sony kept running for twelve and a half years afterward. up to twenty...
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2010-06-10
SpaceTime (2007 - 2010)
eddie bakhash shipped the beta on 4 june 2007 and techcrunch called it pure eye candy, sort of like second life meets firefox. spacetime took your google...
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2010-06-04
PGP Corporation (2002 - 2010)
network associates gave up on pgp in october 2001, suspended development, and put the assets out for sale. jon callas and phil dunkelberger founded a company...
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2010-06-02
Snyggast.se (2001 - 2010)
upload your face, get a number between one and ten back from strangers. swedish teenagers did that from january 2001, and 318,000 of them passed through in a...
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2010-06-01
MapQuest (1996 - present (effectively dead by 2010))
the way you got driving directions before google maps. you typed in two addresses, got back a list of turn-by-turn instructions, and printed it out on a4 paper...
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2010-06-01
Microsoft Office Live Workspace (2007 - 2010)
microsoft tried to put office documents in the cloud before the cloud was a word people used. you could upload a docx and share a link, and other people could...
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2010-06-01
Myspace IM (2006 - 2010)
myspace ran the most popular social network in the english speaking world from 2005 to 2008 and decided what its users really needed was a windows desktop...
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2010-06-01
Linux for PlayStation 2 (2002 - 2010)
sony sold a box that turned a playstation 2 into a linux workstation: two discs, a 40 gb hard drive, a network adapter and a usb keyboard and mouse. it ran a...
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2010-06-01
mMode (2002 - 2010)
the advertising shipped months before the product did. att wireless spent the january and february of 2002 on unbranded teasers for something called mlife,...
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2010-06-01
Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航) (2008 - 2010)
the ministry of industry and information technology paid 41.7 million yuan for one year of it in may 2008 and never paid again. in may 2009 it ordered every pc...
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2010-06-01
Amapedia (2006 - 2010)
in 2006 amazon decided the best description of a product might come from the people who already owned one, and opened a wiki where any customer could write and...
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2010-06-01
Windows Live Call (2006 - 2010)
the phone icon at the top of every messenger conversation. free computer-to-computer audio and video on one side, paid calls to real telephone numbers on the...
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2010-05-31
Lala (2006 - 2010)
lala was the most interesting music service nobody got to use long enough to remember. it started in 2006 as a peer-to-peer cd trading marketplace, then...
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2010-05-28
FitFinder (2010 - 2010)
a computer science undergraduate at ucl put up a page in april 2010 where you could post, anonymously, the location and description of someone you had noticed...
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2010-05-26
Radar.net (2006 - 2010)
radar was mobile photo sharing in 2006, built for phones that took bad pictures and moved them by mms. you shared to a small circle instead of to the public,...
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2010-05-25
Intel Larrabee (2008 - 2010)
one teraflop out of a single chip, demonstrated on stage at supercomputing in november 2009. that was about a fifth of what you could already buy in a graphics...
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2010-05-25
SweTorrents (2005 - 2010)
a swedish appeals court ruled in may 2010 that telia had to hand over the name of the subscriber running swetorrents, under a copyright law that was barely a...
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2010-05-21
LiveDaily (1998 - 2010)
livedaily was a ticketing company's newsroom. ticketmaster paid reporters to break tour announcements and interview bands from 1998 onward, and mtv news cited...
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2010-05-18
SpinVox (2003 - 2010)
in july 2009 a bbc technology correspondent asked a plain question about spinvox: who is actually typing this. the answer was call center workers in south...
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2010-05-14
Twine (2007 - 2010)
twine was radar networks' bet that the semantic web would finally show up if you built the tools to make it easy. natural language processing extracted...
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2010-05-02
BumpTop (2009 - 2010)
bumptop turned your desktop icons into stacks of paper on a 3d table with physics. you could fling them at the wall or pile them in a corner with a lasso. the...
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2010-05-01
Muxtape (2008 - 2010)
muxtape was a website where you could upload mp3s in a specific order and get a url. that was the entire product. it ran from march 2008 to august 18, 2008...
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2010-05-01
Nokia N900 (2009 - 2010)
the n900 was a debian-flavored linux desktop with a phone glued to the bottom of it. it shipped 11 november 2009 with maemo 5 on a slide-out keyboard, and...
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2010-05-01
Reflexive Entertainment (1997 - 2010)
reflexive entertainment was the casual-game studio behind ricochet lost worlds and big kahuna reef, plus the 2005 igf seumas mcnally winner wik and the fable...
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2010-05-01
Utterli (2007 - 2010)
utterli was a phone-in audio and photo blogging service from the 2007 mobile-web moment. it started as utterz, rebranded to sound softer, then quietly went...
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2010-05-01
Essembly (2005 - 2010)
17,000 registered users in july 2006 was the high-water mark, reported by newsweek, and it tells you how small this stayed. joe green built it in 2005 around...
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2010-04-30
Yahoo! Publisher Network (2005 - 2010)
ypn was yahoo's adsense. cost-per-click contextual ads next to your blog post, monthly check in the mail, us tax id required at signup. it stayed in beta for...
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2010-04-29
Microsoft Courier (2008 - 2010)
i never owned a courier. nobody did. it never shipped. microsoft killed it on april 29 2010 after gizmodo leaked the prototype videos in september 2009 and the...
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2010-04-27
S60 (2001 - 2010)
nokia built s60 on top of symbian and then handed it most of the smartphone market for the better part of a decade. the menu key and the ability to install an...
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2010-04-20
Facebook Lite (2009) (2009 - 2010)
eight months and three countries. facebook shipped a stripped down version of itself in 2009 for people whose connections could not carry the real one, then...
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2010-04-16
Vivaty (2008 - 2010)
vivaty grew out of media machines, the company built around flux, an x3d and vrml viewer that ran as a browser plugin, and it renamed itself in may 2008 to...
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2010-04-15
Halo 2 (Xbox Live) (2004 - 2010)
microsoft turned off the original xbox live on april 15, 2010. fourteen players refused to log out of halo 2, the last server in the world for the original...
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2010-04-15
AT&T WorldNet (1996 - 2010)
at&t worldnet launched in march 1996 as ma bell's direct counter to aol. the pitch was flat-rate consumer dial-up at $19.95 a month with unmetered hours,...
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2010-04-15
Room for PlayStation Portable (2009 - 2010)
tokyo game show 2009 got a demo of a psp with a living room inside it. r∞m gave japanese handheld owners a 3d apartment, an avatar, a blog and an album, and...
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2010-04-12
KernelTrap (2001 - 2010)
jeremy andrews ran kerneltrap by doing one unglamorous thing for most of a decade: reading the linux kernel mailing list so that nobody else had to, then...
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2010-04-09
Vision Mobile Browser (2002 - 2010)
the browser sat on the phone and the work happened somewhere else entirely. novarra put a server between a java feature phone and the open web, and that server...
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2010-04-06
The Daily Jolt (2000 - 2010)
between 2000 and 2010 the daily jolt ran a separate website for each of more than a hundred colleges in the united states and canada. one page carried the...
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2010-04-03
Microsoft Origami (UMPC) (2006 - 2010)
origami was a microsoft and intel platform initiative for ultra-mobile pcs, formally revealed at cebit on 9 march 2006. the spec called for a touchscreen of 7...
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2010-04-01
Simpy (2004 - 2010)
simpy was one of the social bookmarking sites that grew up alongside delicious in 2004. you saved and tagged your links, then searched the whole pile later,...
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2010-04-01
tr.im (2008 - 2010)
august 2009 is when the web found out what a short link actually is. nambu network announced tr.im was over, then reversed itself within days and promised to...
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2010-04-01
SpyLOG (1999 - 2010)
a small graphic in the footer of a russian web page, counting you. spylog opened its tracker in november 1999, had more than fifty thousand sites registered by...
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2010-03-31
Snapvine (2005 - 2010)
snapvine put a phone line on a profile page. you called a number and punched in a code, and your voice landed on somebody's myspace page as a player that...
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2010-03-31
CURURU (2005 - 2010)
nhn japan arrived in japan with three products and by the summer of 2005 the search engine and the portal were both already closed. what was left got rebuilt...
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2010-03-31
Extra.hu (1999 - 2010)
in january 2010 dotroll gave hungary's oldest free hosting service a two-month deadline and a discount code. the announcement was published on a subdomain of...
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2010-03-30
Mozilla Sunbird (2003 - 2010)
mozilla sunbird was a standalone calendar program from the mozilla foundation, the same people who made firefox. announced in july 2003 and first released in...
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2010-03-30
.yu (1989 - 2010)
a country code is a political fact wearing technical clothes, and .yu is what happens when the politics move and the code does not. it was delegated on 15 june...
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2010-03-22
Google China (2006 - 2010)
google spent four years running a search engine that agreed in advance to remove results, on the theory that a filtered google was better for chinese users...
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2010-03-17
Core Design (1988 - 2010)
nine people walked out of gremlin graphics in 1988 and set up in derby, and eight years later they made tomb raider, which turned a loss at eidos into a profit...
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2010-03-15
IslamOnline (1997 - 2010)
for almost thirteen years the largest arabic-language religious reference site on the internet was written in a building west of cairo by about 350 people. in...
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2010-03-15
G.ho.st (2006 - 2010)
g.ho.st stood for global hosted operating system and it lived on the country code of sao tome and principe, which remains the best thing about it. what loaded...
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2010-03-12
Wayfinder (1995 - 2010)
wayfinder sold turn-by-turn navigation as a monthly subscription on symbian and java handsets, back when the alternative was a garmin suckered to the...
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2010-03-12
a.scarywater.net (2002 - 2010)
october 2002, when bittorrent was barely a year old and nobody had worked out what to do with it yet, a german hobbyist server called wirebrain.de started...
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2010-03-12
MusicMight (2001 - 2010)
taranaki, new zealand, is where the biggest metal encyclopedia on the web was maintained by one man out of his own house. garry sharpe-young had rockdetector...
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2010-03-09
Nicktropolis (2007 - 2010)
nicktropolis was nickelodeon's browser virtual world on nick.com, a flash city where kids made a little avatar and wandered themed areas built around the...
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2010-03-08
Cities XL (Planet Offer) (2009 - 2010)
cities xl shipped in october 2009 as a city builder with a subscription layer bolted on top, called the planet offer, where your city sat on a shared...
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2010-03-03
Google SearchWiki (2008 - 2010)
google shipped searchwiki on 20 november 2008 and hung small controls off every result on the page, so a signed-in user could push a link to the top of their...
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2010-03-03
OpenMicroBlogging (2008 - 2010)
evan prodromou wrote the spec in july 2008, five days after launching identi.ca, and waived every right he had over it in the copyright line. it was twenty...
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2010-03-01
3.5" Floppy Disk (1981 - 2010)
the small plastic square that everyone had a stack of in 1995. it held 1.44 mb, it made a small whirring sound when you saved, and it is now only a save icon...
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2010-03-01
Playahead (1998 - 2010)
playahead was sweden's teenage internet. originally hångelguiden in 1998, rebranded playahead in 2000, profile pages and interest-based teams for swedish high...
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2010-03-01
Frappr (2005 - 2010)
one of the first google maps mashups, a widget your group embedded to pin everyone on a shared map. kun gao built it in 2005 and platial bought it in 2007....
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2010-03-01
JANJAN (2003 - 2010)
janjan was japan's citizen-journalism paper, launched in february 2003 by ken takeuchi, a former asahi shimbun reporter who had gone on to be mayor of kamakura...
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2010-03-01
Spymac (2001 - 2010)
in april 2004 a mac rumor board started handing out one gigabyte mailboxes while gmail was still invite-only, and six hundred thousand people showed up for it....
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2010-03-01
Win4Lin (2000 - 2010)
version 5.5, february 18 2009, was the last release anybody shipped. win4lin ran windows applications inside a window on a linux desktop, first the windows 9x...
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2010-02-26
Celebdaq (2002 - 2010)
the bbc took a mechanic that popex.com had been running on musicians since 1998 and pointed it at celebrities. you got ten thousand pounds of imaginary money,...
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2010-02-19
Haloscan (2002 - 2010)
haloscan was the third-party comment widget that lived underneath every blogspot post for most of the 2000s, in the long stretch before blogger.com shipped...
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2010-02-19
On2 Technologies (1992 - 2010)
a company almost nobody could name wrote the code that played video on your computer for eighteen years. it started as the duck corporation in 1992 doing...
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2010-02-19
Marratech (1998 - 2010)
a swedish company out of luleå university of technology, founded in 1998, selling desktop software for e-meetings: voice and video with a shared whiteboard and...
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2010-02-18
Torrents.ru (2004 - 2010)
torrents.ru was the largest bittorrent tracker in the russian-speaking world, open from 18 september 2004 and holding four million registered accounts and...
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2010-02-15
Maemo (2005 - 2010)
maemo was the linux distribution nokia built for its internet tablet line starting in november 2005 with the nokia 770. four hardware generations shipped over...
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2010-02-11
RedOctane (1999 - 2010)
activision paid ninety-nine point nine million dollars in 2006 for a company that had started by renting games through the mail and then moved into dance pads....
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2010-02-03
Yahoo! HotJobs (1996 - 2010)
yahoo hotjobs was a us labor market product. turkish jobs ran through kariyer.net and yenibiris and later linkedin. yahoo paid 436 million for hotjobs in 2002....
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2010-02-02
Windows Mobile (2000 - 2010)
windows mobile was the pocket-pc-era microsoft mobile os, launched april 19 2000 as pocket pc 2000 on a windows ce 3.0 kernel. it peaked at 42 percent market...
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2010-02-02
Project Darkstar (2007 - 2010)
oracle closed the 7.4 billion dollar sun acquisition on 27 january 2010, and within a week a sun engineer posted on the project darkstar forum that the project...
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2010-02-01
Yoonew (2004 - 2010)
two mit sloan students turned the price of a world series ticket into a derivatives problem and then sold the answer to sports fans. you bought a contract on a...
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2010-02-01
Forterra Systems (1998 - 2010)
a defense contractor bought the technology on 1 february 2010, took about twelve of the engineers with it, and that was the end of the company. forterra had...
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2010-01-31
KartOO (2001 - 2010)
kartoo was the french visual meta-search engine that ran from 2001 to january 2010. results came back as a swf-rendered map of linked blobs, not a list of ten...
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2010-01-31
Northwest Airlines (1926 - 2010)
the last flight under the northwest code was 2470 from los angeles to las vegas on 31 january 2010, and by the time it landed the reservation systems had...
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2010-01-27
Sun Microsystems (1982 - 2010)
the silicon valley brand that built java and a long list of other infrastructure you have used without thinking about who wrote it. founded february 1982 at...
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2010-01-21
Crispy Gamer (2008 - 2010)
in january 2010 a board of directors decided that a games magazine with a million readers a month was worth less than the ad network attached to it, and cut...
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2010-01-12
Yahoo! Go (2006 - 2010)
yahoo go was the version of yahoo you got on a phone in 2006. mail, flickr, onesearch, weather, finance, all behind one j2me jar or one windows mobile...
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2010-01-07
Nokia Mobile Web Server (2007 - 2010)
nokia research center ported apache to symbian, called the project raccoon, and in june 2007 put the result out through beta labs so an ordinary n95 could...
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2010-01-06
Meridian 59 (1996 - 2010)
meridian 59 was the first commercial 3D graphical MMORPG, launched 7 october 1996 by archetype interactive under 3DO's publishing label. it predated ultima...
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2010-01-06
Chromehounds (2006 - 2010)
for three and a half years the neroimus war ran on sega's servers, a territorial campaign fought by squads of player-built mechs over a map that changed hands...
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2010-01-03
Macteens (1998 - 2010)
on 3 january 2010 the site went offline so that it could be rebuilt. the status blog set up to chronicle the rebuild managed four posts, the last of them in...
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2010-01-02
rssCloud (2001 - 2010)
dave winer registered the domain in july 2009 and wrote on the front page, great domain name, don't you think. the idea was older than that: the cloud element...
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2010-01-01
cjb.net (1998 - 2010)
cjb.net handed out free yourname.cjb.net subdomains that redirected to your real homepage url, plus free email aliases. if your geocities page was at the...
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2010-01-01
Yonja (2003 - 2010)
yonja was the first dominant turkish-language social network. founded by kerim baran in san francisco on 1 february 2003, it ran with an english-only ui for...
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2010-01-01
Disaboom (2006 - 2010)
disaboom was the us social network for people with disabilities. founded in september 2006 in lone tree, colorado by dr. j. glen house with co-founder j.w....
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2010-01-01
Quechup (2007 - 2010s)
idate corporation, a las vegas web shop, launched quechup as a small social network with a "check for contacts" button that read the whole address book and...
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2010-01-01
Zingy (2001 - 2010)
zingy was the manhattan ringtone startup that fabrice grinda ran up to 200 million dollars in sales inside three years. it launched in 2001, cornered the...
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2010-01-01
Dungeon Runners (2007 - 2010)
ncsoft's early free-to-play experiment. a diablo-shaped mmo with a self-parody streak and a $4.99 optional membership tier. lasted two and a half years before...
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2010-01-01
Nokia MOSH (2007 - 2010)
mosh was nokia's pre-ovi attempt at a user-driven mobile content hub. audio, images, games, java midlets, videos, all uploaded by users with no screening. it...
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2010-01-01
Metaplace (2007 - 2010)
metaplace was a platform that let ordinary people build their own virtual worlds in a browser, made by raph koster, the designer behind ultima online and star...
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2010-01-01
yfly (2006 - 2010)
a social network for american teenagers, launched by nick lachey in 2006 with a wall of celebrity accounts and a heavy layer of safety features. it wanted to...
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2010-01-01
Araby.com (2006 - 2010)
araby.com was maktoob's attempt at a search engine that actually understood arabic instead of treating it as a foreign string. it launched in september 2006...
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2010-01-01
Pipex (1990 - 2010)
peter dawe started pipex in 1990 as the public ip exchange, selling internet access to british companies at a point when the academic network was the only...
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2010-01-01
Jippii (1999 - 2010)
saunalahti was a finnish internet provider assembled out of a dozen smaller ones, and in 1999 it opened a portal that became the largest web destination in the...
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2010-01-01
Xbox Live Vision (2006 - 2010)
xbox live vision was a small usb camera that clipped to the top of a television and mostly took your photograph. thirty nine dollars ninety nine bought the...
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2010-01-01
Toshiba Libretto (1996 - 2010)
toshiba shipped the libretto 20 in japan on 17 april 1996, a full windows pc that weighed 840 grams and fit in a coat pocket, years before anything else did....
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2010-01-01
Sony Memory Stick (1998 - 2010)
sony launched the memory stick in october 1998 and then spent a decade making sure its own cameras and handhelds would take nothing else. the format worked...
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2010-01-01
Sirius Stiletto (2006 - 2010)
a satellite radio you could carry, running linux underneath and a portable .net runtime on top, with wi-fi as a fallback for when the sky was blocked by a...
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2010-01-01
VCR Plus+ (1990 - 2010)
a number between one and eight digits long, sitting in the corner of a newspaper listing, encoded the channel and the start time and the length of a program...
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2010-01-01
Intel Turbo Memory (2007 - 2010)
one gigabyte of nand flash on a little card inside the laptop, sitting between the hard disk and windows vista, promising faster boots and a disk that stopped...
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2010-01-01
nARTBOX (엔아트박스) (2000 - 2010)
a korean stationery chain spent the first decade of the 2000s running a website where you sent animated greeting cards starring the characters printed on its...
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2010-01-01
Freesurf (1999 - 2010)
claranet paid one symbolic euro for freesurf on 4 june 2007 and had the company dissolved within a year. the service had opened on 19 april 1999 as the french...
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2010-01-01
RichCopy (2001 - 2010)
ken tamaru first built this at microsoft in 2001, and it reached the rest of us in the spring of 2009, when technet magazine ran it as that month's free...
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2010-01-01
YouAre.TV (2006 - 2010)
be seen, said the logo. youare.tv launched in january 2006 into the same twelve months as every other video startup, and tried to win on taste rather than...
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2010-01-01
Symantec Online Backup (2008 - 2010)
february 2008 to january 2010, and no announcement at either end of the second date. symantec launched a business backup service on its protection network...